The Races Of Europe
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Reviews
(3)
Reviewer:
Laraine_Lynn
-
favoritefavoritefavorite -
June 1, 2024
Subject: This book is referenced in an interesting article:
Subject: This book is referenced in an interesting article:
"No more ‘Homo stupidus’: Why Neanderthals are getting a makeover"
Story by Angus Holland
at url:
... au/news/australia/no-more-homo-stupidus-why-neanderthals-are-getting-a-makeover/ar-BB1n35cW" rel="ugc nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/no-more-homo-stupidus-why-neanderthals-are-getting-a-makeover/ar-BB1n35cW
Story by Angus Holland
at url:
... au/news/australia/no-more-homo-stupidus-why-neanderthals-are-getting-a-makeover/ar-BB1n35cW" rel="ugc nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/no-more-homo-stupidus-why-neanderthals-are-getting-a-makeover/ar-BB1n35cW
Reviewer:
Hans Schemm
-
favoritefavoritefavoritefavoritefavorite -
May 23, 2021
Subject: The races of Europe have been in the New World a long time before Kolumbus came.
Subject: The races of Europe have been in the New World a long time before Kolumbus came.
White Genocide of the Chachapoyas
At the head of the Amazon River, deep in the cloud forests of the Peruvian Andes lived a tribe of white people known ... as the Chachapoyas (Warriors of the Clouds). These hardy people farmed the hillsides, raised livestock and guinea pigs for food. The Chachapoyas civilisation consisted of a number of small cities spread out over vast mountainous terrain. They are believed to be the last of the white tribes that once inhabited the lands down as far as Northern Chile where the world’s oldest mummies can be found. Some archaeologists have speculated that the cloud people could have been European exiles who escaped during the Roman conquests of the Celtic or Carthaginian lands.
The Chachapoyas’ dead were meticulously mummified and carefully placed on ledges and tombs overlooking the valleys of their living space. Sometimes they built hollow Easter Island like structures around the mummies and painted them with red, white, yellow and black ochre. The mummies watched over their land to ward off evil. Should ever the wicked heart of an anti-white set eyes upon a mummy they would be cursed to live out the rest of their short lives in madness and guilt.
It is conceivable that as the Asiatic Amerindians pushed into their living space the white genocide process began. First it was non-violent, consisting of individuals falling in love and being accepted into each other’s tribes. Then as the Inca realised that the Chachapoyas cities were small enough to conquer and had land and resources that they wanted, the preparations for war began.
Possibly due to Incan aggression, the Chahapoyas constructed their massive hilltop fortified-city complex of Kuelap, known as the Machu Picchu of the North. This fortified-city was made from hundreds of tons of stone blocks and at the top they built their unique round houses with pointy thatched roofs. It is believed that the Chachapoyas were fearsome warriors and were able to defend themselves against savage Incan attacks for many generations.
In 1493 the Chachapoyas were finally over powered and white genocide became violent. The tall fair women were carted off to become wives of the conquerors. The Inca introduced a policy called ‘Mitma’ where they resettled many Chachapoyas to other parts of the empire and brought in thousands of non-whites to assimilate with them in order to eliminate the Chachapoyas’ race and culture to prevent them from ever demanding self determination and freedom from taxation and parasitism while their land was plundered.
When the Spanish arrived in 1532 on their quest to subdue the mighty Incan empire, many of the remaining white tribesmen joined the Spanish army to exact revenge on the blood thirsty Inca. Unfortunately many Chachapoyas succumbed to small pox and suffered under Spanish rule as well. Demographics is destiny. Today the Chachapoyas have comparatively lighter skin, fairer hair and are still known for their beauty.
Interestingly some Chachapoyas have an uncanny resemblance of Irish or the Basque people and used what we know as the Celtic cross in their jewellery. They still adorn their artefacts with the curved swastika of the ancient Europeans.
The 10th stage of genocide is ‘Denial’. Anti-whites deny that the targeted group ever existed at all. Much effort is made by the globalist establishment to prevent thorough investigations on these archaeological findings should they shed light on current events.
Even the Lonely Planet guide book that most travellers refer to has white washed its pages of any references to the fairness of the Chachapoyas.
The Chachapoyas, or ‘People of the Clouds,’ controlled the vast swath of land around present-day Chachapoyas from AD 500 to around 1493, when the Incas conquered the area and ended the Chacha isolation. Very little is known about this civilization, whose inhabitants were thought to be great warriors, powerful shamans and prolific builders who were responsible for one of the most advanced civilizations of Peru’s tropical jungles. Today, among the many dozens of cliff tombs and hamlets of circular structures left behind, archaeologists match wits with grave robbers in a race to uncover the heritage of the Chachapoyas.”
The Rough Guide travellers guide book on the other hand still includes honest descriptions.
In Aymara, Chachapoyas means “the cloud people”, perhaps a description of the fair-skinned tribes who used to dominate this region, living in one of at least seven major cities (like Kuelap, Magdalena and Purunllacta), each one located high up above the Utcubamba Valley or a tributary of this, on prominent, dramatic peaks and ridges. Many of the local inhabitants still have light-coloured hair and remarkably pale faces. The Chachapoyas people, despite building great fortifications, were eventually subdued by the empire-building Incas. Chachapoyas was once a colonial possession rich with gold and silver mines as well as extremely fertile alluvial soil, before falling into decline during the Republican era.”
It is very important that Australians learn from historic events and recognise the white genocide process so we can take actions to prevent a total repeat. History teaches us that the majority of white Australians will succumb and go extinct for ever but a break away civilisation could be the solution. It only takes a few thousand Honorable Australians to create a future where their children can be safe. The rest of the population are waiting for the very people who are actively destroying their race to stop and reverse the situation for them. This ignorance has already condemned their grand children to a future much like the favelas of Brazil where car-jackings and gun crime happens daily.
I can foresee the day when the last fair-skinned Australians survive high in the rugged Snowy Mountains. Few people believe that they once ruled the entire Australian continent from a city they built and named Canberra. The Anti-white Globalists for years had imposed a policy called ‘Multiculturalism’ to flood the continent with non-whites and assimilated them to destroy their race and culture to prevent them from ever demanding self determination and freedom from taxation and parasitism while their land was plundered.
Some people say that they were called ‘Snowy Mountaineers’ because of their fair-skin, while others say no whites ever lived in Australia and ‘Snow Mountaineers’ was just a reference to the mountains that they inhabited and to think other wise makes you a conspiracy theorist.
If anyone thinks for one minute that the Globalist anti-whites will build museums to remember us; think again. Australia is still over 70% white but if you visit the Darwin museum on Dickward Drive by the aptly named Fanny Bay you will see galleries of aboriginal art and artefacts. You will see displays of fauna and flora, of geology and cyclone Tracy simulators. You will find a massive hangar full of illegal immigrant boats, small ships and dug out canoes.
Apart from the tax payer funded building with air-conditioning, electric lighting, running water and mechanical elevators there is basically no hint that white people ever lived in the Northern Territory at all. We have been white washed from history while we are still the majority. What will it be like when they make us a minority?
White people used to make up 30% of the worlds population but now we make up just 8% and falling. Millions of non-whites are being flooded into every white majority country and assimilated with ‘Multicultural’ programs.
There will still be a billion Africans in Africa, a billion Indians in India and 2 billion Asians in Asia. How long will it take for white children to be made extinct for ever? ‘Multiculturalism’ is just a code word for White Genocide.
renegadetribune(.)com/white-genocide-of-the-chachapoyas/
At the head of the Amazon River, deep in the cloud forests of the Peruvian Andes lived a tribe of white people known ... as the Chachapoyas (Warriors of the Clouds). These hardy people farmed the hillsides, raised livestock and guinea pigs for food. The Chachapoyas civilisation consisted of a number of small cities spread out over vast mountainous terrain. They are believed to be the last of the white tribes that once inhabited the lands down as far as Northern Chile where the world’s oldest mummies can be found. Some archaeologists have speculated that the cloud people could have been European exiles who escaped during the Roman conquests of the Celtic or Carthaginian lands.
The Chachapoyas’ dead were meticulously mummified and carefully placed on ledges and tombs overlooking the valleys of their living space. Sometimes they built hollow Easter Island like structures around the mummies and painted them with red, white, yellow and black ochre. The mummies watched over their land to ward off evil. Should ever the wicked heart of an anti-white set eyes upon a mummy they would be cursed to live out the rest of their short lives in madness and guilt.
It is conceivable that as the Asiatic Amerindians pushed into their living space the white genocide process began. First it was non-violent, consisting of individuals falling in love and being accepted into each other’s tribes. Then as the Inca realised that the Chachapoyas cities were small enough to conquer and had land and resources that they wanted, the preparations for war began.
Possibly due to Incan aggression, the Chahapoyas constructed their massive hilltop fortified-city complex of Kuelap, known as the Machu Picchu of the North. This fortified-city was made from hundreds of tons of stone blocks and at the top they built their unique round houses with pointy thatched roofs. It is believed that the Chachapoyas were fearsome warriors and were able to defend themselves against savage Incan attacks for many generations.
In 1493 the Chachapoyas were finally over powered and white genocide became violent. The tall fair women were carted off to become wives of the conquerors. The Inca introduced a policy called ‘Mitma’ where they resettled many Chachapoyas to other parts of the empire and brought in thousands of non-whites to assimilate with them in order to eliminate the Chachapoyas’ race and culture to prevent them from ever demanding self determination and freedom from taxation and parasitism while their land was plundered.
When the Spanish arrived in 1532 on their quest to subdue the mighty Incan empire, many of the remaining white tribesmen joined the Spanish army to exact revenge on the blood thirsty Inca. Unfortunately many Chachapoyas succumbed to small pox and suffered under Spanish rule as well. Demographics is destiny. Today the Chachapoyas have comparatively lighter skin, fairer hair and are still known for their beauty.
Interestingly some Chachapoyas have an uncanny resemblance of Irish or the Basque people and used what we know as the Celtic cross in their jewellery. They still adorn their artefacts with the curved swastika of the ancient Europeans.
The 10th stage of genocide is ‘Denial’. Anti-whites deny that the targeted group ever existed at all. Much effort is made by the globalist establishment to prevent thorough investigations on these archaeological findings should they shed light on current events.
Even the Lonely Planet guide book that most travellers refer to has white washed its pages of any references to the fairness of the Chachapoyas.
The Chachapoyas, or ‘People of the Clouds,’ controlled the vast swath of land around present-day Chachapoyas from AD 500 to around 1493, when the Incas conquered the area and ended the Chacha isolation. Very little is known about this civilization, whose inhabitants were thought to be great warriors, powerful shamans and prolific builders who were responsible for one of the most advanced civilizations of Peru’s tropical jungles. Today, among the many dozens of cliff tombs and hamlets of circular structures left behind, archaeologists match wits with grave robbers in a race to uncover the heritage of the Chachapoyas.”
The Rough Guide travellers guide book on the other hand still includes honest descriptions.
In Aymara, Chachapoyas means “the cloud people”, perhaps a description of the fair-skinned tribes who used to dominate this region, living in one of at least seven major cities (like Kuelap, Magdalena and Purunllacta), each one located high up above the Utcubamba Valley or a tributary of this, on prominent, dramatic peaks and ridges. Many of the local inhabitants still have light-coloured hair and remarkably pale faces. The Chachapoyas people, despite building great fortifications, were eventually subdued by the empire-building Incas. Chachapoyas was once a colonial possession rich with gold and silver mines as well as extremely fertile alluvial soil, before falling into decline during the Republican era.”
It is very important that Australians learn from historic events and recognise the white genocide process so we can take actions to prevent a total repeat. History teaches us that the majority of white Australians will succumb and go extinct for ever but a break away civilisation could be the solution. It only takes a few thousand Honorable Australians to create a future where their children can be safe. The rest of the population are waiting for the very people who are actively destroying their race to stop and reverse the situation for them. This ignorance has already condemned their grand children to a future much like the favelas of Brazil where car-jackings and gun crime happens daily.
I can foresee the day when the last fair-skinned Australians survive high in the rugged Snowy Mountains. Few people believe that they once ruled the entire Australian continent from a city they built and named Canberra. The Anti-white Globalists for years had imposed a policy called ‘Multiculturalism’ to flood the continent with non-whites and assimilated them to destroy their race and culture to prevent them from ever demanding self determination and freedom from taxation and parasitism while their land was plundered.
Some people say that they were called ‘Snowy Mountaineers’ because of their fair-skin, while others say no whites ever lived in Australia and ‘Snow Mountaineers’ was just a reference to the mountains that they inhabited and to think other wise makes you a conspiracy theorist.
If anyone thinks for one minute that the Globalist anti-whites will build museums to remember us; think again. Australia is still over 70% white but if you visit the Darwin museum on Dickward Drive by the aptly named Fanny Bay you will see galleries of aboriginal art and artefacts. You will see displays of fauna and flora, of geology and cyclone Tracy simulators. You will find a massive hangar full of illegal immigrant boats, small ships and dug out canoes.
Apart from the tax payer funded building with air-conditioning, electric lighting, running water and mechanical elevators there is basically no hint that white people ever lived in the Northern Territory at all. We have been white washed from history while we are still the majority. What will it be like when they make us a minority?
White people used to make up 30% of the worlds population but now we make up just 8% and falling. Millions of non-whites are being flooded into every white majority country and assimilated with ‘Multicultural’ programs.
There will still be a billion Africans in Africa, a billion Indians in India and 2 billion Asians in Asia. How long will it take for white children to be made extinct for ever? ‘Multiculturalism’ is just a code word for White Genocide.
renegadetribune(.)com/white-genocide-of-the-chachapoyas/
Reviewer:
Dr. Frank P. Mintz
-
favoritefavoritefavoritefavoritefavorite -
July 9, 2018
Subject: Impressionistic) Portrait of an Anthropologist's Ascent: Carleton Stevens Coon and The Races of Europe ... (1939)
Subject: Impressionistic) Portrait of an Anthropologist's Ascent: Carleton Stevens Coon and The Races of Europe ... (1939)
At the time of his passing, June 1981, Carleton Stevens Coon, age 76, was lauded in a New York Times obituary "as one of the last great general anthropologists...."
...
This tribute was remarkable as it came well after the star of this 20th century Renaissance man had lost much of its luster, as had a comprehensive anthropology rooted in careful analysis of skeletal structure supplemented with a thorough knowledge of archaeology, linguistics, and history--for at no point did he neglect culture. Carleton (or "Carl") Coon had lived a full life of scholarship in the groves of academe, but ventured far beyond, having completed extensive field work in North Africa, Ethiopia, and the Balkans. During the Second World War, he actively supported American and Allied forces in North Africa, running guns as an agent of the Office of Strategic Services to members of the French resistance in Morocco in connection with Anglo-American campaign of 1942-1943 against Axis forces. He returned to the field postwar, exploring sites in the Middle East. Shortly thereafter, he appeared frequently on the early television science series "What in the World?" and became president of the American Anthropological Association in 1962.
Coon, born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, embodied the best of blue blood New England stock by choosing not to rest on the laurels of inherited wealth and intelligence and fill a comfortable niche, but to go as far as his curiosity and initiative would take him. By the time of Macmillan's publication in 1939 of The Races of Europe (ROE), he had already authored several books and become an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Harvard, his Alma Mater. Clearly, his attendance there was not a mere rite of passage, as it was for many of the favored classes, but a credential for "the strenuous life" of disciplined adventure.
Coon may be compared with others who were contemporaries, or nearly such, including Madison Grant (v. my review of The Conquest of a Continent), Earnest Hooton (his teacher and mentor at Harvard), and Carleton Putnam (v. again, review of Grant), writers on race and anthropology with differing emphases. Another, from a similar milieu, was William Z. Ripley, from Medford, Massachusetts, who had lived on into the era of Coon's emerging fame. It was Ripley, who first authored The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study (1899), an extremely influential work, and it fell to Coon to have the honor to author a book bearing a virtually identical title, with the encouragement of Ripley himself.
Ironically--and this is the starting point for understanding his system--Coon rejected the anthropological mold of his predecessor and adopted a more sophisticated approach to the study of the emergence and development of the various branches of the white race in Europe and adjacent areas of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. In particular, he found the tripartite white classification system championed by Ripley--Nordic, Alpine, Mediterranean--to be overly simplistic and much preferred the typologies similar to those employed by Joseph Deniker (1852-1918), a Frenchman born in Russia. Deniker used approximately 13 classifications for varying types of whites, not only from Europe proper, but from adjacent areas, such as the North and Northeast Africa, the Middle East, and the Iranian plateau. Coon considered him the "most important classifier" and noted his merits in not categorizing all blondes as Nordics and not separating out all "browns" from the greater Mediterranean family of the White race. Coon also owed much to the Sicilian author on the role of the Mediterranean race, Giuseppe Sergi (1841-1936); Sergi had proposed that the Nordic was a phase of the greater Mediterranean race.
Though not mentioning how Grant and others had used Ripley, he suggested that the latter's system was too easily converted into a springboard for nationalist sentiments and dissociated himself in a cautious way from those who made race a vehicle for the aspirations of particular national communities. His glossary even condemns "Nordicism" as a flawed ideology for superlative characterizations of the Nordic race and invidious comments about the traits of other races. For readers of Coon who have only a general interest in anthropology, but not advanced training in the field, a critical chapter is "Introduction to the Study of the Living" where Coon not only discusses his intellectual predecessors and contemporaries, but gives a comprehensive review of his approach (with an accompanying chart) as presented gradually in the preceding chapters. The chart (v. page 290 in the original/internet [o/i] edition) lists the types or races he finds among the overall white population of the planet, as well as possible near relatives: to the familiar Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean he adds East Baltic, Borreby, Neo Danubian, Dinaric, Atlanto-Mediterranean, Armenoid, and Irano-Afghan, and he throws in Mongoloids/American Indians, as having at least a more remote relationship to the various white races.
This chapter is placed at a key juncture between summaries of past discoveries in anthropology and supporting fields and the next series of chapters reviewing examples of living populations in Europe and adjacent areas. This mid-introduction is also helpful in understanding his extensive photographic plates of numerous exemplars and another short synopsis of his system accompanying these plates, which depict "in the flesh" the extensive racial typology he employs. (Some participants selected to portray the races of Europe resided not far from Coon's New England home soil.)
Eras of Climate Change, Open Borders, and Migrations: "Invasion" and Absorption
What is crucial for appreciating Coon's work is some acceptance of evolutionary theory, at least that long epochs had to transpire before selection and mixing in various climates could take place in order to produce the specific types and distinctive mixtures of whites that were present as of the mid-20th century. Consider a world without historical memory in Europe and beyond, the world of prehistory in which tens of thousands of years pass by in a few moments of discourse or in a reader's brief glimmer of imagination: eons in which the polar ice advanced and retreated, advanced again and drew back, and ultimately ebbed, at least substantially, and for a decent interval; in which what is now the Baltic sea changed in several thousand years from an ice-dammed lake, to a salty sea, a fresh water lake, and back to a salty sea; in which what is now "Scotland" was linked with "Denmark" by a land bridge; and in which North Africa and even the Sahara were far more lush, but then dried out, except for crucial areas in the Nile Delta and mountain fringes of present-day Morocco. Based on what could be determined from findings of skeletal remains in England and East Africa, Coon was satisfied that the first truly sapiens human was a White--probably a general Mediterranean type, that is, of a relatively slender build, long-headed (from eyebrows-to back of the skull) probably brunet-white in pigmentation with dark eyes, and that it could be traced as far back as 250,000 years to what is now termed the "Ionian" era of the "mid-Pleistocene"--the Pleistocene itself (commonly known as the "Ice Age") lasting, it is assumed, from 2-1/2 million years ago to nearly 12,000 years B.C.
Coon stated that southwest Asia (near Israel/Palestine) or East Africa was the probable source of the primal sapiens, and noted that some skeletal findings suggested a development in a "negroid" direction of some portion of initial full humans, but did not find that the linkage to Africa meant a fundamental connection to the evolution of the Negro branch of homo sapiens. The primal-human was old enough, Coon judged, to antedate the controversial Neanderthal man, whose status is conflicted between either a genuine homo sapiens or a type of near-sapiens. In any case, Coon found that Neanderthal, a creature of intense cold, who may have lived on as late as 40,000 years ago, was not so "species-alien" that the primal Mediterraneans could not intermittently advance from points east with the ebb and flow of the glacial ice and meet, mate, and procreate with them to establish new fully sapiens types--despite their Neanderthal heritage. That some skulls found in Palestine (the Skhul series), which would have been within the more eastern range of Neanderthal, indicated admixture between Neanderthals and pure sapiens, bolstered his thesis. Subsequently, these open borders of pre-history led to an intermediate offspring--the round-skulled Cro-Magnon man (from a site in southwestern France). Two sketches by German artists compare and contrast Neanderthal with Cro-Magnon (o/i, p. 35).
During the span of the late Pleistocene through the Mesolithic era, heirs of the Cro-Magnon "complex" appeared in two distinctive forms in European and adjacent populations. Coon termed them "Upper Paleolithic" survivors: one a broad-faced brachycephalic type he termed "Borreby", named for skeletal finds at Borreby, Denmark; the other, more long-headed to reflect the longer-brained Mediterranean precursor, was the "Brunn" (after site of skeletal finds at Brunn [or Brno], Czechoslovakia). Both types were tall, well-muscled, water-retentive (as they could not experience much evaporation of bodily fluids brought about elsewhere by intense sun-light) and lived as hunter-gatherers in Europe. There were parallel types in North Africa who stayed in mountainous areas of the northwestern tip of the continent. Large stretches of Europe continued to be lightly populated. Brunn's and Borreby's withdrew to the north with the retreating ice-cap as climate change made that continent warmer than at present.
One development during the Mesolithic (which period in Europe lasted from approximately 12,000 until 3,000 B.C.), Coon reported, was a migration of these Upper Paleolithic survivors from present-day Scotland to a practically uninhabited Ireland. These survivors would become a reemerging part of the Irish population in more recent times and blend with other arrivals in the Emerald Isle. Otherwise, beyond the survival of an aboriginal hunting-fishing population and its "invasion" of Ireland, Coon informed readers that, given a minimal skeletal record, there was a little could be established with certainty about the nearly nine millennia of Mesolithic time. It was clear, however, that the hunter-gatherer populations of this era also lived by fishing (when and where greater warmth led to flowing streams and unfrozen lakes where a catch could be netted).
The Arrival of the Neolithics
It may be that the advent of small, brunet "classic" Mediterraneans, along with other variants, and the appearance of the "Alpine" (a type so upsetting to Grant) in Europe occurred before the end of the Mesolithic epoch, but Coon was surer that their existence as a larger part of the European community could be better established with the coming of the Neolithic culture bearers. Prior to 3,000 B.C., while the Mesolithic culture reigned in Europe, an agricultural economy based on the planting of seeds, cultivation of crops, and the domestication of animals to assist cultivation began to develop in the southern shores of the Mediterranean--especially Egypt-- Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley. As hotter, drier conditions developed in North Africa and Palestine/West Asia, massive population shifts and migrations occurred along the southern Mediterranean and in the Middle East.
Since the Nile Delta retained sufficient rainfall from the earlier period, populations who already had a knowledge of farming and animal domestication from adjacent areas converged on north-central Egypt, while others headed via North Africa to various parts of southern and western Europe, to include the British Isles. These Mediterraneans, direct descendants of the earliest sapiens, were of several varieties. Most familiar to moderns were the short, dark types who migrated to Crete, southern Italy, Spain, and less conspicuously, to the British Isles. Others, the taller Atlanto-Mediterraneans, travelling chiefly by sailing craft, invaded Wales, Ireland, England, and western Scotland. Leaving the British isles, some of them migrated to "Denmark" and made this area of northern Europe a productive agricultural center.
Coon stressed that "the concept Scandinavia as the home of a pure Nordic race or of any other single group during the Neolithic is a completely false one (o/i, p.121)." The Nordics themselves were a de-pigmented phase of the Mediterraneans--skeletally similar, but with a different coloration. This judgment was a reflection of the earlier findings of Sergi. Just when full Nordics appeared in the light of anthropology and history was not a matter easily settled: at least this was the situation with respect to the state of anthropological science by the late 1930's. The "Nordification" of particular populations may have been a gradual process since even within the basically brunet groups instances of blondness and lighter eyes could and did occur, possibly as mutations. Members of the living Atlanto-Mediterranean race were, in some cases, blue-eyed as well. What was needed was a dimming of sunlight that made the pigment-producing melanin of no survival value. A deficiency in copper was related, as well, to a lightening of hair and eyes. Probably not well established at the time was the need for more melanin to absorb vitamin D from the sun's rays as these became increasingly intense--and to have less when and where sunlight dimmed.
The Appearance of the Alpine
Was the Alpine an alien intruder from the East that disrupted the proper equilibrium of the white races as Grant had argued? Coon found significant skeletal evidence of what he described as a reduced and "foetalized" Upper Paleolithic type in Belgium that could be dated to the era of the great Neolithic arrivals in Europe. There were further discoveries of "shrunken" post-Neanderthal remains in France. Coon basically argued that there was some natural mutational tendency toward this reduction of height and further skull roundness that was not intrusive, but a pervasive phenomenon at many points extending from the central latitudes of Western Europe, particularly France, through a wide zone reaching the Middle East and beyond into Central Asia. There were numerous later instances in which initially long-headed groups including Slavic speakers and Jews became rounder headed ("bracycephalized"). However, he conceded that while there was more evidence from Neolithic grave sites, the Mesolithic was a virtual black hole for data, and it was not possible to rule out that the Alpine as a type had entered Europe from outside.
Two Other Strands: Mediterranean-to-Nordic
Two other groups began an approach to Europe from locations somewhat to the north of the starting points of the small and "Atlantean" Mediterraneans: the Danubians and the Corded people. Their paths, probably by land from Anatolia and the shores of the Black sea, put them en route to Eastern, Central, and Northern Europe via the Danube river valley. The Danubians came as farmers and breeders of oxen, pigs, and sheep while the Corded people, known for their corded pottery designs, were particularly long-faced and more muscled than other Mediterraneans. The Cordeds seemed to be traders with an aggressive streak, armed with battle axes. The Danubians moved up through Hungary, Czechoslovakia, southern and southwest Germany, and into northern France. The Danubians sought out unforested lands in the river valleys for farming. Meanwhile, the Cordeds were part of the immigration into contemporary Denmark, supplementing the Atlanto-Mediterranean elements and blending with the earlier Pleistocene survivors. The Corded element also reached Germany's south and southwest, where they found colonies of small Mediterraneans already in place. Coon recounted that they "superimposed" themselves over their more slightly built cousins. A mixture of the Danubians and Cordeds would, in time, yield what could be termed a "Nordic" with some confidence.
Bronze Age Population Arrivals in Europe
The Bronze Age started early in Egypt and Mesopotamia and lasted far longer than in Europe; it marks the beginning of what could be called pre-classical antiquity, with the rise of great civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia which had the greatest knowledge of the new metal created by alloying copper with tin. These civilizations flourished almost completely within the era of Bronze, and waned as iron came increasingly into use. For Europe, another agent for further racial development in the heyday of Bronze was the arrival of the "Dinaric" by sea from Asia Minor, Palestine, and Cyprus (named literally for copper). The Dinaric, with initially Middle Eastern traits of beaked nose, had a long face, but a rounder skull. Europe now had a third brachycephal in its midst, joining the Borreby, and the latter's reduced relative, the Alpine. The Dinarics made their new homes in the Balkans, various points in central Europe, and notably, the British Isles. The Dinaric is really the outcome of a principle (Dinaricization)--a distinctive blending of long and round headed ancestors--and not just a human being with some long-faced and round-headed traits. Coon postulated a "2 to 1" ratio of Mediterranean to Alpine heritage needed to create a genuine Dinaric.
Although the Nordic most typifies the next era of metal, Coon assumed that during Bronze period, the mixing of Corded and Danubian Mediterraneans, and their loss in varying degrees of dark pigmentation had created this type. This Nordic, not always uniformly blond, could be found in a nucleus and in various points of concentration, and had a range, not limited to Europe, but which stretched from Germany to the Altai Mountains. Most likely, Corded types entered ancient Greece during the Bronze Age and engrafted their language (an Indo-European variant [see below]) upon the inhabitants of longer standing at this strategic terminus of the Balkans. By incorporating much of the speech of the old-timers into their own idiom, they created a unique and extremely influential language that is part of no larger family.
The Iron Age, the Nordic, and the Beginnings of Shared Historical Memory
Europe begins to have a common culture in the Age of Iron, spanning from more than 1,000 B.C. (the classical period of Greece and Rome), to the early Middle Ages. The indispensable development during these centuries is the formation of the Indo-European languages--with essentially Nordic speakers at their core--and their dispersal from a probable locus in Western Russia/Ukraine to the door-step of the Far East and south to India, and westward through the European continent and subsequently to the British Isles and Iceland. The Indo-European tongues, sometimes called Aryan, Coon maintained, were derived from a blend of Finnic (and probably Altaic) speech, and languages of the Caucasus, and if this mixture were ever stable or uniform at some point, it fragmented into most of the language families we can identify as Slavic, Baltic, Germanic, Romance, Keltic, and Indo-Iranian. In Europe, these languages were gradually imposed upon the tall Paleolithic survivors, the shorter Alpines, the various purer Mediterraneans, and the Dinarics. Speakers of Indo-European tongues worshiped a relatively similar pantheon of gods and goddesses that became the dominating pagan cults throughout areas subdued by Alexander, the armies of Rome, the Kelts, wherever they spread, or the Nordic invaders of Scandinavia. Coon added a word of caution, namely that the finding of a Nordic type(s) and any traces of blond hair at ancient burial sites and monuments did not mean that the recovered individuals or populations necessarily conversed in any language within this group.
Aryan languages could be transitory since their speakers fought for prominence in particular areas, conquered or receded, or were transformed by influxes, generally of other Aryan speakers. Today, Indo-European in whatever form is familiar to most of the world while anthropologists and linguists lack certainty about the tongues of the Mediterraneans who invaded Europe during the Neolithic era, or the languages of the Bronze period, let alone what the primeval Europeans spoke, even though all of these groups bequeathed their appearances, in full or in part, to the various white (or mixed-white) peoples of today.
To illustrate the ebb and flow of languages, whether of Aryan or another origin, one may initially cite Italy and Spain. Despite progress made in understanding its alphabet, much remains to be learned of the language of the Etruscans, with their center in contemporary Tuscany; at one time, it was considered non-Aryan, and Etruscans have been described as near-eastern in facial appearance. If this people had retained their hold on the Italian peninsula, then our understanding of past events in "Italy" would have come through writers of Etruscan script, and our trade, diplomatic, and cultural ties to the "boot" would require at some point an understanding of Etruscan. There is some speculation more recently that Etruscan was actually an early Indo-European language brought over from the eastern Mediterranean, but, in any case it ceased to be spoken by the end of the first century A.D.
In Italy, as well, Keltic was a language, associated with a particular type of Nordic that fought--as Gauls--for supremacy over the speakers of proto-Latin. In the end, Italic (as formal Latin) won the contest, with tremendous repercussions for the world. Coon points out that these two language groups were initially related (though to most moderns a link between Keltic and Romance languages is difficult to appreciate); and further that the Roman leadership class shared a Keltic-Nordic physical type with the Kelts, who bestowed their offspring and languages far and wide, and once had a center of dominance in southwestern Germany.
In Spain, Semitic Carthaginian--related to Phoenician--was spoken in some portions of Andalusia (for example, consider the name sake Cartagena); but was extinguished in Iberia by the Roman victories in the Punic Wars--though not in the area of Carthage itself. Meanwhile, further north, there is a living remnant of a far older past in the form of the Basque language, unintelligible to most Spaniards. Linguists continue to dispute the origins of a language that they can compare only very tentatively with others spoken far from Iberia. Coon linked the Basques with the Age of Bronze, based on their physical type which, he concluded, was a mixture of the Dinaric race arriving in Europe at that time with already resident Atlanto-Mediterraneans. One could assume (even if Coon does not), that in addition to Semitic Carthaginian and the mysterious Basque, some form of Hamitic was also spoken in Europe proper, brought over by the diminutive Mediterraneans from North Africa who chose not to migrate towards the Nile Delta during a period of climate change when the desert began to erode fertile farm lands. But, on this point, Coon was not as forthright as Madison Grant, as Grant stated confidently that the language of the early Mediterraneans in Europe was Hamitic.
The British Isles as a "Case in Point"
To do justice to the vast coverage of ROE, it is helpful to see how his methodology based on the available skeletal record, archaeological discoveries, historical findings and recollections, and an examination of data on the "living" (to include individuals studied with cranial measuring tools) is applied to the British Isles. For Americans have had a variant of English as the binding national language for four centuries, and the British Empire once encircled the globe. Today, English, reflecting the accumulated power and prestige of the Anglo-Americans, has vast influence as an international idiom, surpassing the once potent French as the language of diplomacy, culture, and technology.
Coon found that most of the British Isles, in which he includes Ireland, Britain proper, Wales, Cornwall, and Scotland, to be more complicated in their record of human habitation than one would expect, given their marginal position on the periphery of Europe. The record of humanity in the Isles, specifically Britain proper, Coon traced back to the earliest known sapiens, identified by the location of skeletal findings as "Galley Hill" man, "Swanscombe" man, and, more problematically he acknowledged, "Piltdown" man (determined subsequently to be a fraud). Whatever the defects of claims regarding these remains--whether as to sapiens status or actual age--Coon judged that primal humanity in the form of a primitive Mediterranean appeared in the dimmest past and mixed with Neanderthal populations to give rise to Upper Paleolithic types (as on the continent). There followed the Neolithic era of farming, with small and tall Mediterraneans arriving, with Coon giving more importance to the latter (the megalith-building Atlanto-Mediterraneans, who created such monuments as Stonehenge) since the actual skeletal record for the smaller variety was scanty. The Ages of Bronze (copper first, to be alloyed with tin), was conveyed by a combined group from central Europe arriving via the Rhine (with Dinarics in the mixture), and unaccompanied invading Dinarics of an earlier inception coming in directly from the Near East. On the isle of Britain proper, the Bronze Age elements pushed back the largely Megalithic Mediterraneans to the hills.
Of greater significance, whether from the physical or linguistic standpoint for the British Isles, is the arrival of the Kelts in approximately 500 B.C. The designation "Britain" began to be used in classical antiquity about 200 years later to refer to the island of Britain in imitation of the terminology the new invaders used. The Kelts, who were representatives of Iron Age culture, Coon described as moderately long-headed Nordics, with sloping foreheads, and probably having brown rather than blond hair. They created, for a time, an almost binding physical type and culture in Britain proper, extending to central Scotland, but advancing no farther against the resistance of the Picts. Coon regarded the Picts as lighter than commonly thought and probably a remnant of the comprehensive/part Dinaric group that had arrived from central Europe; they may have spoken an early form of Keltic even though, seemingly in contrast to his own system, they were part of the earlier Bronze invasions. In Ireland, the Kelts were somewhat less concentrated, except in the upper class, which imposed their clan system (headed by "the Kings of Tara") and language on their predecessors in the Emerald Isle.
The Roman invasions led by Caesar and ultimate occupation of Britain ("Britannia") under Emperor Claudius were not decisively important for the racial development of the British Isles. Ireland was bypassed entirely, and the Empire ultimately stayed south of Scotland. Further, the Roman administrators themselves may have differed only slightly from the conquered Kelts, whose language endured with some admixture of Roman speech. What might have changed Britain proved transitory: the Romans brought in racial Alpines of the type found in much of the Italian peninsula and elsewhere to populate the towns and to form a merchant class. Coon reported that evaluation of skeletal remains in Kent, the area of greatest Roman strength in Britain, suggested that this Roman-Alpine population endured as a substantial group into the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance, but after that time has appeared only sporadically among particular individuals.
The Roman connection with their island outpost was severed by new incursions of Germanic tribes throughout the Empire early in the fifth century. Romans citizens and subjects were left to stay or leave as they saw fit. The new Teutonic invaders broke the lingering Keltic hold over Britain and gradually marginalized an emerging Kelto-Roman language. These incoming Angles-Saxons-Jutes, of a more robust and blonder Nordic type than the Kelts, reduced the cultural centers of the latter to surviving pockets in Strathclyde (western Scotland), Wales, and Cornwall. In Wales, a form of the language has survived into the present; it died out in Cornwall in the 19th century. Western Scotland received an influx of Keltic-speakers from Ireland in 500 AD, who in apparently unintentional cooperation with Saxon invaders on the east coast, put an end to Pictish domination in the Scottish North.
After the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, it is possible to speak of "Angle-land" (at least south of Scotland), with the name "Britain" a reminder of the older heritage. Ireland, however, remained a Keltic refuge from the Anglo-Saxon occupation. But the Kelts of Ireland could not repel the further incursions of Northmen from Denmark and Norway, who occupied the Irish east coast, to include Dublin. They also became a presence in eastern England and Scotland.
Slightly later came the somewhat anomalous Normans, of the same Scandinavian "Norse" mold. The Normans, having taken up residence in the French peninsula that bears their name, absorbed a form of Roman-derived French and subsequently began an invasion of England. After their victory at the Battle of Hastings (1066), they began to fuse their language with the English of the Anglo-Saxons, not replacing it, but gradually giving it the far greater Latin/French-based vocabulary that it has today. The name "England" would continue. A century later, the Normans began a fateful encroachment into Irish territory; this centuries long, tedious process would ultimately bring Ireland under the dominion of England and, in its north, of lowlands Scots. From a racial standpoint, the Normans, as an elite overlord class were no longer numerous enough amidst the growing population to profoundly change the composition of the British Isles, but the English language would push the Keltic Gaelic of Ireland to its remote corners in the south and west; parallel to what had happened when the earlier Anglo-Saxons subdued the Kelts as the Roman Empire in the west disintegrated.
In his study of the contemporary populations throughout the British Isles of the earlier 20th century, Coon began first with Ireland, as easier to trace and amply documented--in contrast to the somewhat more difficult situation in the English isle, where extensive documentation was less available, especially for the contemporary population. Of particular importance in ROE is a collection of anthropometric data on 10,000 male individuals compiled in Northern Ireland and the south (officially referred to as the Irish Free State at the time) and assembled by Coon's colleagues at Harvard to create a "composite" Irishman. Based in great measure on evaluation of this data, Coon found that a critical development separating the Irish from their regional neighbors was "the reemergence of the Paleolithic element" of the Pleistocene and Mesolithic eras. These, whether long headed or round headed, were in the process of making a comeback in the Emerald Isle and had a much greater influence on the overall population than might be presumed. He concluded that it was "no exaggeration" that the pre-Neolithic aboriginals contributed about half of the genetic ancestry of the contemporary Irish.
Via the photographic supplement, readers were invited to note comparisons with the current populations of western North Africa to see how the Paleolithic heritage was a common thread tying together the Irish and certain North Africans despite the differences of language and culture that separate histories had dictated. This heritage fostered an overall larger head-size and muscular frame in Ireland, and the reddish hair--which was probably not as characteristic of the Keltic Nordics, who were largely brown or light-brown haired. The widely-noticed Irish tendency to freckling undoubtedly sprang from aboriginal sources. This element reappeared in an almost undiluted form, particularly in the southwest. Overall, Coon found that in greater part the modern Irish were a blend of these "Upper Paleolithic" people with "Keltic Iron Age Nordics"; secondary components were Atlanto-Mediterraneans, and Dinarics who had arrived during the Bronze Age. Smaller Mediterraneans were not an abundant presence.
Despite the fact that on the "main island," Anglo-Saxon speech had created a land and people known respectively as "England" and "the English," overall findings to date demonstrated, as reliably as possible (there being no survey of the "living" comparable to the massive study Coon had for Ireland), that England was from the racial standpoint a more reliable Keltic than an Anglo-Saxon homeland. A Keltic type of brown-haired Nordic with a receding forehead was basic throughout England and Scotland as well--both in the past and present.
Further, there was no white aboriginal resurgence as in Eire. What had occurred, particularly with industrialization, was a reemergence of a shorter-statured brunet population that Coon had thought originally less important than the Atlanto-Mediterranean element in England, Scotland, and Wales. As if echoing Grant, based perhaps on common sources, Coon attributed this increase of shorter, dark people to the industrial revolution and the growth of slums, which somehow selected more favorably for a once submerged and less notable group: ROE detected its rise in the industrial cities of both England (midlands region) and Scotland (notably Glasgow). The small Mediterraneans had probably reemerged in Wales (already a statistically darker land by English standards), as well.
There are many ironies in the study of population transformations and linguistic dominance. The Kelts, who had once given most of the British Isles a binding language, despite the different variations of Keltic, were now less associated with the pockets of this language that remained in Wales and western Scotland. In these regions, as once in Cornwall, this remnant speech was frequently uttered on the lips of people who were Mediterraneans, and hence pre-Keltic. In the special case of Cornwall, whence Coon's paternal ancestors originated, ROE reported that there were some dark, curly-haired Middle Eastern Dinarics, especially sailors, whose forebears came from Troy--if local legends had grains of truth.
With respect to other more ancient or exotic survivals in England, Coon cited the work of H. J. Fleure (The Races of England and Wales) to show that in some remote Welsh areas, there remained a more primitive Mediterranean of the type antedating the Neolithic arrival, which possibly recalled the very early sapiens (unmixed with Neanderthal strains). Overall, though, to prevent too much from being made of Welsh Mediterraneans, Coon found that the original bearers of Keltic speech in the principality, the Keltic Nordics, were still the majority type, if less so than in the rest of England proper. Further, certain areas of Wales were important centers of red-hair. Whether it was only the Mediterranean stratum, as opposed to the others, that kept Keltic speech alive there is not abundantly clear in ROE.
Meanwhile, the actual Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian English made a strong presence in eastern England and Scotland, being more blond (sometimes ash blond) than a typical, browner-haired Englishman. Reiterating some ideas that remain popular, Coon reported that the English, to include in great measure the Scots, had slightly darker eyes than the Irish, but tended towards lighter hair. Like the Irish, they were generally fair-skinned; further their skin usually burned rather than tanned when exposed to the sun. Despite the lack of an "Upper Paleolithic" resurgence comparable to developments in Eire, red hair and freckling were notable in some areas. The Scots rivaled the Irish in the presence of freckling and red hair shades. Not necessarily invoking Upper Paleolithic inspiration, Coon linked them to some mutation in those Dinarics who had participated in the invasion of Scotland via the Rhine during the Bronze Age.
With respect to other attributes of the Scots (who are not separated out from the English as neatly as the Welsh in ROE), Coon reported that they were the tallest people in England. Concerning local elements in Scotland, the Keltic-speaking survivors in the western highlands paralleled the Irish in having dark hair and blue eyes; not astonishing in view of the onslaught of Gaelic-speaking Kelts from Ireland that had trapped the Picts in a pincer movement as Saxons invaded from the East.
The Other Living "Races of Europe"
Not always with the same detail that he employed in treating the British Isles, given the vastness of the project and varying amounts of data, Coon covered the peoples of the North--the Finns, Lapps, Samoyeds, Swedes, modern Norwegians, and Danes; the "Central Zone" of French, Belgians, Germanic peoples, the Hungarians and Slavs, the greater Mediterranean world--from Iberia, across North Africa to the Middle East and Arabia, Anatolia, and the Caucasus; and the contemporary peripheries of the white race in Central Asia and West Siberia. He found great stretches of the Alpine race from France to Syria, and then on to Central Asia. Among some findings: the Alpine race was much stronger in France than in Switzerland, where the Alpine mountain nation was once considered the homeland of this race; the Nordic race appeared only sporadically as a pure type in Germany, being mixed with Borreby's, Alpines, and East Baltics; along the Black Sea periphery from the Caucasus, through southern Ukraine, and into Balkans, and even Central Europe (Czechoslovakia and Bavaria) Coon reported a notable diffusion of a type similar to the Atlanto-Mediterranean, which he preferred to designate as "Pontic"; the modern Hungarian was more apt to be of mixed central and eastern European origin--only a smaller element with a somewhat more Mongoloid appearance could typify the true "Magyar" element in the population (exemplar of the latter disclosed in the photo section, o/i, p. 417).
One of the great merits (despite the risks) of ROE is its extensive photographic supplement of mostly living participants intended to illustrate virtually all of the racial types classified in the book. Perhaps of the peripheral races, only the Ainu of northern Japan are not covered. Coon stresses that to appreciate the underlying unity of particular exemplars, the reader must thrust aside the visible differences imposed by dress, coiffure, and cultural and social status. Putting aside such distinctions is, however, complicated by an additional need to ignore differences in facial mold based on varying degrees of linguistic tension (language variations, Coon admitted, guide the use of facial muscles), and possibly subtle differences in the deposit of flesh over the skull. Thus ROE asks the reader to note some parallels between certain Paleolithic survivors in North Africa and their counterparts in Eire, but the comparison doesn't always come off easily; similarly, the Alpines from Germany, particularly, and those from various points in the Near East have a different look, presumably based on millennia of separation in different language zones, and dissimilar climates.
On a day-to-day- basis, it can hardly be doubted that most readers would have difficulty in distinguishing many dark Alpines from Mediterraneans, or light ones from Nordics. It may be hard, too, on the basis of a glance to separate some Borreby types from Nordics or Mediterraneans, especially in areas away from the Borreby homeland of Denmark and northern Germany. Basically, most people cannot see that anthropologically; they go by the gestalt of coloration combined with facial features that are immediately visible, not by the shape of the skull as viewed from above or measured with various calipers.
The American Past and Future
Ignoring the claims of the "Norse apologists" who set an 11th century date for the discovery and initial settlement of North America under Lief Ericsson and Erik the Red, Coon pinpointed 1492 as turning point in which the peripheral nations of Europe turned outward to conquer the New World and the extreme Southern Hemisphere. These nations, particularly England, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands, were strongholds of the Mediterranean race in its two basic forms, the Nordic and the initially brunet-shaded type. The Nordics were the conquerors of North America, subduing aboriginal peoples (with possibly distant connections to the Ice Age hunter gatherers of prehistoric Europe), while their darker counterparts, especially the Spanish, conquered relatively crowded New World Amerindian empires already in place, or least their remnants. America--the United States--had emerged as a great Nordic reservoir, whose earliest colonists were not necessarily typical of the English, but were selected for their mission, and had interbred in a new and challenging environment creating new generations of "gangling" creatures. Coon took no stand on the recently imposed immigration restrictions, but by implication, could be cited against them (and against Madison Grant), as he had maintained at the outset, that Polish emigrants to the United States were more Nordic than their compatriots who stayed behind. In that sense, the immigration quotas, were not necessarily "pro-" but anti-Nordic.
The achievements of majority-Alpine France in the New World, however, are a notable omission. Despite their defeat in the French and Indian Wars, France had left an enduring presence in Quebec (as well as in Louisiana) and rendered indispensable support in the creation of the independent American nation. Had Napoleon not had his reasons for selling off the vast tract that was the Louisiana Purchase, the Alpine nation, indeed, would have been a factor to contend with on the western border of the young Nordic republic.
A Critique
The historical context in which Coon wrote was dramatic: it was the eve of a new war, with Hitler ascendant, but about to run out of bloodless victories; Mussolini was firmly established in Italy and was issuing racial edits of his own; and Franco was about to assume control of Spain in Madrid. Stalin was the helmsman in the Kremlin. To have access to published studies, archaeological sites, and museums, or simply to be able to discuss findings with eminent anthropologists throughout Europe, it was necessary for the scholar to be somewhat the diplomat. It was clear that Coon rejected the findings of popular Nazi-oriented writers on racial topics, opposed the cult of Nordicism; and followed the work of the German-Jewish anthropologist, Franz Weidenreich, very closely.
But caution was the best option. The journal Deutsche Rassenkunde is praised for the contributions of its editors and writers, who must have functioned under National Socialist supervision. Similarly, Coon refers to the Germany's political unity as an achievement of Bismarck and its social unity as an accomplishment of Hitler (o/i, p. 535). There is no no other mention of Hitler and no attempt to determine his racial status; Mussolini is without a single reference; but, whether as a "dig" or not, Franco is described a Mediterranean like most of his Spanish colleagues, but as a "hook-nosed Cappadocian" variant (i.e., with origins in Anatolia). In concluding ROE, Coon expressed admiration of his Soviet counterparts for their skill in making careful anthropological measurements and their expertise in classifying Mongoloid types and Ural-Altaic speakers: "...we must take off our hats to our colleagues in Moscow (o/i, p. 649)."
There is no doubt that his horizon was rooted in the supremacy of the first-world empires that was on its way to virtual reversal in the decades after World War II. Coon, in remarking on the relative technological ignorance of Europeans about to encounter Bronze Age technologies brought in from by new invaders from the east, stated that a post-Neolithic "Italian or Spaniard could no more produce a metal dagger than a modern Arab can make a machine-gun." Nothing could sound more passe today.
Coon was an example of "humbition" (an apt coinage of the late philosopher Walter Kaufmann). Ambitious enough to offer a comprehensive theory spanning literally hundreds of millennia and to apply it to living populations nearly worldwide. But he did so without any cocksure arrogance and with sufficient humility to welcome further research in areas that needed clarification, and where he could not be certain. The Mesolithic period remained murky. The Alpines did dwell on a vast expanse from France to the Caucasus and Central Asia, so that some vast migrations could have occurred; or the post-glacial peoples who emerged as shrunken "Alpines" in Europe could have dwelt throughout a vast range in distant millennia to produce "foetalized" Alpine counterparts in Asia. What was the pre-agricultural history of the food-producing Mediterraneans, who were to migrate west and spread their technology to Europe? The origins of the Corded proto-Nordics and the megalithic-building Atlanto-Mediterraneans were, he conceded, other weak points in the overall fabric of ROE. He also regretted that he had more information on smaller exotic populations on the northern and central Asian fringes of Europe than on many major countries of basically white populations.
Today, one could take issue with some of his comments on contemporary populations based on his own travels and studies of the published record. With respect to coloration of particular races and racial mixtures in Greater Europe, use of Internet-based sites such as You Tube, enables arm-chair anthropologists to study in living color the composition of musical groups (and their audiences), soldiers on parade, soccer teams playing, politicians debating, etc.; on this basis, one might conclude (as this writer) that Slovenes, as well as Croatians, have more dark-haired types than he might have recognized, while Serbs have many individuals with lighter hair. Coon's record of the living can serve as a guide for those who want to take their own video tour of the areas explored in ROE to verify or contradict if necessary.
A fundamental shortcoming sprang from the very title he had chosen in honor of Ripley, the anthropologist with whom at many points he disagreed. Obviously, ROE is not dealing with the racial elements of "Europe," but with a vast Eurasian, North African, West Asian, and East African expanse. For example, ROE depicts the literal center of the Mediterranean race not in Italy or Spain, but in the Arabian peninsula. Coon himself must have realized that The Races of Europe was too constricting; perhaps The Races of Trans-Europe would have served him better. Certainly, no reader of the book could conclude that the origins of the whites are cast in a strictly European context.
Further, though an expert in construction and organization of scholarly writings, with a tremendous command of vocabulary, Coon did not author a book that is easily understood by an interested general reader; ROE is heavily filled with anthropological shop-jargon. This text must have been difficult for those, who as college students of the era, had to be tested on its contents. It can be appreciated only after several reads. In other instances, Coon did write for a wider public.
Overall, one could also ask: Why Race? He did not claim to have a clear definition of a concept the he considered fluid. In finding distinct types of whites, he stressed he wanted no part in casting any aspersions. The color of the Europeans, however contrasting, was of lesser and fleeting importance; with whites it was subject to change over the centuries. Skeletal and facial form and metrics were more decisive. What was clear was that particular branches of the common race provided progressive technologies to less advanced populations, whether systematic crop-growing or animal breeding, the use of copper and iron, or even the development of sea-going craft that could conquer the first "space barrier." Eras of conquest had given Europe its lasting set of mutually intelligible languages that were a bridge connecting past, present, and future. For the author of ROE, it might have been a culmination of an interest in the actual variety of humans he could see in his childhood travels to Egypt with his father, a cotton broker. Race was fascinating because it's here and there.
On some points Coon proved prophetic--though not alone. A Neanderthal presence in modern European populations is now conceded; at least in part, full humans had interbred with this Ice Age relic. And he was reasonably accurate in other areas. One finding that primitive sea-going craft of ancient peoples could navigate the Mediterranean and reach points as far as Scotland was basically corroborated after the war by Thor Heyerdahl, who used primitive vessels to confirm the ability of early seafarers to travel long distances in the Pacific. That there was a Mediterranean element that arrived in the British Isles (and at other Western European locations) from elsewhere, bringing megalith-building technologies and agriculture is conceded in a recent broadcast of findings on Public Radio International (PRI). Readers of ROE would not be startled at all that there was a "Maria" who dwelt in Eire, and who had bequeathed remains with DNA that is found in present-day Sardinia. She is described as small rather than an Atlanto-Mediterranean (which Coon thought more important in the British Isles). The article, accompanied by a brief interview segment can be accessed via the following link:
https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-12-30/dna-solves-mysteries-ancient-ireland
Nor is it startling to find here that, based on discoveries of remains dated a thousand years later (the "Rathlin boys"), that the modern Irish have DNA traced to the steppes of Russia, rather than the Mediterranean area; that would be in accordance with the view, not limited to Coon at the time, that the center of the Indo-European speakers was in the west of Russia--and that an original Keltic, with other Aryan languages, probably had its origins in this region. One point of difference is that this report of findings indicates that the Keltic presence in the Emerald Isle (and presumably elsewhere in the British Isles) considerably antedates the 500 B.C. approximation of Coon and others and is part of the Bronze Age.
Again, to cite the British Isles as a case in point, the application of DNA-based genetics has led to some conclusions about the extent of hunter-gatherer heritage in the people of modern England, that even inflate Coon's estimates. While ROE had found a paleolithic survivor resurgence in Ireland, with a Mediterranean upswing in the demographics of the modern Kingdom of England, a recent study contends that most English have hunter-gatherer genetics, with much less impact from those who came later, to include the Kelts (David Miles,The Tribes of England). (Consult the link below at--
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/07/0719_050719_britishgene.html )
This type of recent work has its limitations: the author, as others who employ DNA analysis, concede that the approach is in its infancy, and further pruning is necessary. One important aspect worth consideration is the decisiveness of trace elements rather than a majority DNA component in guiding actual physical appearance. The contrast is frequently posed as genotype vs. phenotype. That there are definite Mediterraneans, Dinarics, and Nordics present in the British Isles, in addition to those who would bear an appearance that recalls the earlier Brunn's-Borreby's, is beyond dispute. Perhaps an individual could be of approximately 80 percent genetic post-Glacial inheritance, but look about 90 percent Keltic-Nordic or Atlanto-Mediterranean, based on the role of the remaining 20 (or fewer) percentage points in driving the overall physical appearance. Classical physical anthropology and the new genetics of DNA might reach an accommodation on the basis of the role of trace elements in guiding--at least--outward appearance.
Recessional
The Races of Europe marked Coon's upward trajectory leading to a generation of prominence, with posts at the University of Pennsylvania and recognition beyond the academic community to the new medium of television. A downward path was imminent with the publication of Coon's The Origin of Races (1962). The Second Reconstruction Era of the rising Negro Civil Rights movement and sustained efforts to overturn legalized segregation in the American South, was in its heyday--nearly 100 years after the abolition of slavery that was ultimately followed by the collapse of the First Reconstruction in the South. In briefest essence, citing the evidence of fossil remains, Coon had argued in Origin that the five major branches of humanity--Congoids, Capoids, Australoids, Caucasoids, and Mongoloids--had developed their characteristic racial appearances before becoming fully sapiens; further, their entrance into a completely human homo sapiens state was timed separately, with the date for the entrance into humanity of the white Caucasoids and black Congoids at opposites extremes: that of the former timed at more than 200,000 years ago; of the latter, roughly 30,000 years ago. Originally, in ROE Coon was confident in the viability of his thesis that the Caucasoids derived from a Neanderthal-sapiens blend. Now the author was most likely a changed man, as was his Neanderthal--tentatively placed in the Caucasoid tree.
Coon avowed no political aims, but he was seen by publicists for segregation as in their corner, for he had stated at the outset his supposition that the longer a race had been sapiens, the greater its capacity for civilization. Carleton Putnam, one of the most prominent of the anti-integration publicists of the period (v. discussion in review of Conquest of a Continent), sought and got Coon's assistance behind the scenes in framing the arguments to be used in stating his case; particularly Coon counseled against any explicit references to the Nordicist Grant.
On a number of occasions, Putnam was a visitor at Coon's home. They were actually distant relatives, both being descended from Revolutionary War General Israel Putnam. (This covert collaboration is related in John P. Jackson's paper, "In Ways UnAcademical: The Reception of Carleton S. Coon's The Origin of Races.") Throughout their association, Coon declined to become a formal contributor to organizations combating the concept of racial egalitarianism, such as the early International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics (IAAEE), or to openly join in the struggle. He was having sufficient problems of his own, with some highly critical reviews and commentary pertaining to The Origin of Races. When the American Society of Physical Anthropologists voted to condemn Putnam's Race and Reason, Coon resigned as president upon learning that only one member had actually read the book.
Coon would continue to write on anthropological topics. A major work was The Living Races of Man written in 1965, in collaboration with anthropologist Edward E. Hunt, co-author with Coon of Anthropology from A to Z (1963). He would also later publish his memoirs as an OSS agent in North Africa shortly before his passing.
But by the early 1970's his veiled bitterness could be discerned on a dust jacket. Not many noticed. In an episode not reported in the Jackson paper, and little known today--a tome much more in the tradition of Grant authored originally in 1972 by one Wilmot Robertson (a pseudonym for the still mysterious Humphrey Ireland) had the following comments from a "foremost anthropologist," later explicitly identified as Carleton S. Coon: "A vast work of scope and scholarship....It carries a heavy blow to the solar plexus....The style is simple, lucid and in places, inspiring." This book, The Dispossessed Majority, countered the growing interest on the political right in corralling Jewish support for conservatism with a strong plea for ostracism of Jews and downgrading their influence; Robertson-Ireland repeated the concept that there was a majority type consisting of Nordics and moderately pigmented Alpines (differing slightly in this sense from Grant) that personified the American nation; forcefully reiterated various arguments for black-white differences, and throughout, pictured a United States in a state of degeneration and accelerating cultural decline. The abyss could be averted by a great in-gathering of Nordics and other northern-Europeans.
That it was Coon who was selected as the lead endorser could only be presumed at the time; but that would be in keeping with his "secret agent" posture of working behind the scenes. Determining whether it was Coon's anger and frustration with the "shape of things that were coming" that spoke, rather than his actual comprehension or appreciation of the contents of Dispossessed Majority, is a project requiring deeper research into his papers.
Coon, born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, embodied the best of blue blood New England stock by choosing not to rest on the laurels of inherited wealth and intelligence and fill a comfortable niche, but to go as far as his curiosity and initiative would take him. By the time of Macmillan's publication in 1939 of The Races of Europe (ROE), he had already authored several books and become an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Harvard, his Alma Mater. Clearly, his attendance there was not a mere rite of passage, as it was for many of the favored classes, but a credential for "the strenuous life" of disciplined adventure.
Coon may be compared with others who were contemporaries, or nearly such, including Madison Grant (v. my review of The Conquest of a Continent), Earnest Hooton (his teacher and mentor at Harvard), and Carleton Putnam (v. again, review of Grant), writers on race and anthropology with differing emphases. Another, from a similar milieu, was William Z. Ripley, from Medford, Massachusetts, who had lived on into the era of Coon's emerging fame. It was Ripley, who first authored The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study (1899), an extremely influential work, and it fell to Coon to have the honor to author a book bearing a virtually identical title, with the encouragement of Ripley himself.
Ironically--and this is the starting point for understanding his system--Coon rejected the anthropological mold of his predecessor and adopted a more sophisticated approach to the study of the emergence and development of the various branches of the white race in Europe and adjacent areas of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. In particular, he found the tripartite white classification system championed by Ripley--Nordic, Alpine, Mediterranean--to be overly simplistic and much preferred the typologies similar to those employed by Joseph Deniker (1852-1918), a Frenchman born in Russia. Deniker used approximately 13 classifications for varying types of whites, not only from Europe proper, but from adjacent areas, such as the North and Northeast Africa, the Middle East, and the Iranian plateau. Coon considered him the "most important classifier" and noted his merits in not categorizing all blondes as Nordics and not separating out all "browns" from the greater Mediterranean family of the White race. Coon also owed much to the Sicilian author on the role of the Mediterranean race, Giuseppe Sergi (1841-1936); Sergi had proposed that the Nordic was a phase of the greater Mediterranean race.
Though not mentioning how Grant and others had used Ripley, he suggested that the latter's system was too easily converted into a springboard for nationalist sentiments and dissociated himself in a cautious way from those who made race a vehicle for the aspirations of particular national communities. His glossary even condemns "Nordicism" as a flawed ideology for superlative characterizations of the Nordic race and invidious comments about the traits of other races. For readers of Coon who have only a general interest in anthropology, but not advanced training in the field, a critical chapter is "Introduction to the Study of the Living" where Coon not only discusses his intellectual predecessors and contemporaries, but gives a comprehensive review of his approach (with an accompanying chart) as presented gradually in the preceding chapters. The chart (v. page 290 in the original/internet [o/i] edition) lists the types or races he finds among the overall white population of the planet, as well as possible near relatives: to the familiar Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean he adds East Baltic, Borreby, Neo Danubian, Dinaric, Atlanto-Mediterranean, Armenoid, and Irano-Afghan, and he throws in Mongoloids/American Indians, as having at least a more remote relationship to the various white races.
This chapter is placed at a key juncture between summaries of past discoveries in anthropology and supporting fields and the next series of chapters reviewing examples of living populations in Europe and adjacent areas. This mid-introduction is also helpful in understanding his extensive photographic plates of numerous exemplars and another short synopsis of his system accompanying these plates, which depict "in the flesh" the extensive racial typology he employs. (Some participants selected to portray the races of Europe resided not far from Coon's New England home soil.)
Eras of Climate Change, Open Borders, and Migrations: "Invasion" and Absorption
What is crucial for appreciating Coon's work is some acceptance of evolutionary theory, at least that long epochs had to transpire before selection and mixing in various climates could take place in order to produce the specific types and distinctive mixtures of whites that were present as of the mid-20th century. Consider a world without historical memory in Europe and beyond, the world of prehistory in which tens of thousands of years pass by in a few moments of discourse or in a reader's brief glimmer of imagination: eons in which the polar ice advanced and retreated, advanced again and drew back, and ultimately ebbed, at least substantially, and for a decent interval; in which what is now the Baltic sea changed in several thousand years from an ice-dammed lake, to a salty sea, a fresh water lake, and back to a salty sea; in which what is now "Scotland" was linked with "Denmark" by a land bridge; and in which North Africa and even the Sahara were far more lush, but then dried out, except for crucial areas in the Nile Delta and mountain fringes of present-day Morocco. Based on what could be determined from findings of skeletal remains in England and East Africa, Coon was satisfied that the first truly sapiens human was a White--probably a general Mediterranean type, that is, of a relatively slender build, long-headed (from eyebrows-to back of the skull) probably brunet-white in pigmentation with dark eyes, and that it could be traced as far back as 250,000 years to what is now termed the "Ionian" era of the "mid-Pleistocene"--the Pleistocene itself (commonly known as the "Ice Age") lasting, it is assumed, from 2-1/2 million years ago to nearly 12,000 years B.C.
Coon stated that southwest Asia (near Israel/Palestine) or East Africa was the probable source of the primal sapiens, and noted that some skeletal findings suggested a development in a "negroid" direction of some portion of initial full humans, but did not find that the linkage to Africa meant a fundamental connection to the evolution of the Negro branch of homo sapiens. The primal-human was old enough, Coon judged, to antedate the controversial Neanderthal man, whose status is conflicted between either a genuine homo sapiens or a type of near-sapiens. In any case, Coon found that Neanderthal, a creature of intense cold, who may have lived on as late as 40,000 years ago, was not so "species-alien" that the primal Mediterraneans could not intermittently advance from points east with the ebb and flow of the glacial ice and meet, mate, and procreate with them to establish new fully sapiens types--despite their Neanderthal heritage. That some skulls found in Palestine (the Skhul series), which would have been within the more eastern range of Neanderthal, indicated admixture between Neanderthals and pure sapiens, bolstered his thesis. Subsequently, these open borders of pre-history led to an intermediate offspring--the round-skulled Cro-Magnon man (from a site in southwestern France). Two sketches by German artists compare and contrast Neanderthal with Cro-Magnon (o/i, p. 35).
During the span of the late Pleistocene through the Mesolithic era, heirs of the Cro-Magnon "complex" appeared in two distinctive forms in European and adjacent populations. Coon termed them "Upper Paleolithic" survivors: one a broad-faced brachycephalic type he termed "Borreby", named for skeletal finds at Borreby, Denmark; the other, more long-headed to reflect the longer-brained Mediterranean precursor, was the "Brunn" (after site of skeletal finds at Brunn [or Brno], Czechoslovakia). Both types were tall, well-muscled, water-retentive (as they could not experience much evaporation of bodily fluids brought about elsewhere by intense sun-light) and lived as hunter-gatherers in Europe. There were parallel types in North Africa who stayed in mountainous areas of the northwestern tip of the continent. Large stretches of Europe continued to be lightly populated. Brunn's and Borreby's withdrew to the north with the retreating ice-cap as climate change made that continent warmer than at present.
One development during the Mesolithic (which period in Europe lasted from approximately 12,000 until 3,000 B.C.), Coon reported, was a migration of these Upper Paleolithic survivors from present-day Scotland to a practically uninhabited Ireland. These survivors would become a reemerging part of the Irish population in more recent times and blend with other arrivals in the Emerald Isle. Otherwise, beyond the survival of an aboriginal hunting-fishing population and its "invasion" of Ireland, Coon informed readers that, given a minimal skeletal record, there was a little could be established with certainty about the nearly nine millennia of Mesolithic time. It was clear, however, that the hunter-gatherer populations of this era also lived by fishing (when and where greater warmth led to flowing streams and unfrozen lakes where a catch could be netted).
The Arrival of the Neolithics
It may be that the advent of small, brunet "classic" Mediterraneans, along with other variants, and the appearance of the "Alpine" (a type so upsetting to Grant) in Europe occurred before the end of the Mesolithic epoch, but Coon was surer that their existence as a larger part of the European community could be better established with the coming of the Neolithic culture bearers. Prior to 3,000 B.C., while the Mesolithic culture reigned in Europe, an agricultural economy based on the planting of seeds, cultivation of crops, and the domestication of animals to assist cultivation began to develop in the southern shores of the Mediterranean--especially Egypt-- Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley. As hotter, drier conditions developed in North Africa and Palestine/West Asia, massive population shifts and migrations occurred along the southern Mediterranean and in the Middle East.
Since the Nile Delta retained sufficient rainfall from the earlier period, populations who already had a knowledge of farming and animal domestication from adjacent areas converged on north-central Egypt, while others headed via North Africa to various parts of southern and western Europe, to include the British Isles. These Mediterraneans, direct descendants of the earliest sapiens, were of several varieties. Most familiar to moderns were the short, dark types who migrated to Crete, southern Italy, Spain, and less conspicuously, to the British Isles. Others, the taller Atlanto-Mediterraneans, travelling chiefly by sailing craft, invaded Wales, Ireland, England, and western Scotland. Leaving the British isles, some of them migrated to "Denmark" and made this area of northern Europe a productive agricultural center.
Coon stressed that "the concept Scandinavia as the home of a pure Nordic race or of any other single group during the Neolithic is a completely false one (o/i, p.121)." The Nordics themselves were a de-pigmented phase of the Mediterraneans--skeletally similar, but with a different coloration. This judgment was a reflection of the earlier findings of Sergi. Just when full Nordics appeared in the light of anthropology and history was not a matter easily settled: at least this was the situation with respect to the state of anthropological science by the late 1930's. The "Nordification" of particular populations may have been a gradual process since even within the basically brunet groups instances of blondness and lighter eyes could and did occur, possibly as mutations. Members of the living Atlanto-Mediterranean race were, in some cases, blue-eyed as well. What was needed was a dimming of sunlight that made the pigment-producing melanin of no survival value. A deficiency in copper was related, as well, to a lightening of hair and eyes. Probably not well established at the time was the need for more melanin to absorb vitamin D from the sun's rays as these became increasingly intense--and to have less when and where sunlight dimmed.
The Appearance of the Alpine
Was the Alpine an alien intruder from the East that disrupted the proper equilibrium of the white races as Grant had argued? Coon found significant skeletal evidence of what he described as a reduced and "foetalized" Upper Paleolithic type in Belgium that could be dated to the era of the great Neolithic arrivals in Europe. There were further discoveries of "shrunken" post-Neanderthal remains in France. Coon basically argued that there was some natural mutational tendency toward this reduction of height and further skull roundness that was not intrusive, but a pervasive phenomenon at many points extending from the central latitudes of Western Europe, particularly France, through a wide zone reaching the Middle East and beyond into Central Asia. There were numerous later instances in which initially long-headed groups including Slavic speakers and Jews became rounder headed ("bracycephalized"). However, he conceded that while there was more evidence from Neolithic grave sites, the Mesolithic was a virtual black hole for data, and it was not possible to rule out that the Alpine as a type had entered Europe from outside.
Two Other Strands: Mediterranean-to-Nordic
Two other groups began an approach to Europe from locations somewhat to the north of the starting points of the small and "Atlantean" Mediterraneans: the Danubians and the Corded people. Their paths, probably by land from Anatolia and the shores of the Black sea, put them en route to Eastern, Central, and Northern Europe via the Danube river valley. The Danubians came as farmers and breeders of oxen, pigs, and sheep while the Corded people, known for their corded pottery designs, were particularly long-faced and more muscled than other Mediterraneans. The Cordeds seemed to be traders with an aggressive streak, armed with battle axes. The Danubians moved up through Hungary, Czechoslovakia, southern and southwest Germany, and into northern France. The Danubians sought out unforested lands in the river valleys for farming. Meanwhile, the Cordeds were part of the immigration into contemporary Denmark, supplementing the Atlanto-Mediterranean elements and blending with the earlier Pleistocene survivors. The Corded element also reached Germany's south and southwest, where they found colonies of small Mediterraneans already in place. Coon recounted that they "superimposed" themselves over their more slightly built cousins. A mixture of the Danubians and Cordeds would, in time, yield what could be termed a "Nordic" with some confidence.
Bronze Age Population Arrivals in Europe
The Bronze Age started early in Egypt and Mesopotamia and lasted far longer than in Europe; it marks the beginning of what could be called pre-classical antiquity, with the rise of great civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia which had the greatest knowledge of the new metal created by alloying copper with tin. These civilizations flourished almost completely within the era of Bronze, and waned as iron came increasingly into use. For Europe, another agent for further racial development in the heyday of Bronze was the arrival of the "Dinaric" by sea from Asia Minor, Palestine, and Cyprus (named literally for copper). The Dinaric, with initially Middle Eastern traits of beaked nose, had a long face, but a rounder skull. Europe now had a third brachycephal in its midst, joining the Borreby, and the latter's reduced relative, the Alpine. The Dinarics made their new homes in the Balkans, various points in central Europe, and notably, the British Isles. The Dinaric is really the outcome of a principle (Dinaricization)--a distinctive blending of long and round headed ancestors--and not just a human being with some long-faced and round-headed traits. Coon postulated a "2 to 1" ratio of Mediterranean to Alpine heritage needed to create a genuine Dinaric.
Although the Nordic most typifies the next era of metal, Coon assumed that during Bronze period, the mixing of Corded and Danubian Mediterraneans, and their loss in varying degrees of dark pigmentation had created this type. This Nordic, not always uniformly blond, could be found in a nucleus and in various points of concentration, and had a range, not limited to Europe, but which stretched from Germany to the Altai Mountains. Most likely, Corded types entered ancient Greece during the Bronze Age and engrafted their language (an Indo-European variant [see below]) upon the inhabitants of longer standing at this strategic terminus of the Balkans. By incorporating much of the speech of the old-timers into their own idiom, they created a unique and extremely influential language that is part of no larger family.
The Iron Age, the Nordic, and the Beginnings of Shared Historical Memory
Europe begins to have a common culture in the Age of Iron, spanning from more than 1,000 B.C. (the classical period of Greece and Rome), to the early Middle Ages. The indispensable development during these centuries is the formation of the Indo-European languages--with essentially Nordic speakers at their core--and their dispersal from a probable locus in Western Russia/Ukraine to the door-step of the Far East and south to India, and westward through the European continent and subsequently to the British Isles and Iceland. The Indo-European tongues, sometimes called Aryan, Coon maintained, were derived from a blend of Finnic (and probably Altaic) speech, and languages of the Caucasus, and if this mixture were ever stable or uniform at some point, it fragmented into most of the language families we can identify as Slavic, Baltic, Germanic, Romance, Keltic, and Indo-Iranian. In Europe, these languages were gradually imposed upon the tall Paleolithic survivors, the shorter Alpines, the various purer Mediterraneans, and the Dinarics. Speakers of Indo-European tongues worshiped a relatively similar pantheon of gods and goddesses that became the dominating pagan cults throughout areas subdued by Alexander, the armies of Rome, the Kelts, wherever they spread, or the Nordic invaders of Scandinavia. Coon added a word of caution, namely that the finding of a Nordic type(s) and any traces of blond hair at ancient burial sites and monuments did not mean that the recovered individuals or populations necessarily conversed in any language within this group.
Aryan languages could be transitory since their speakers fought for prominence in particular areas, conquered or receded, or were transformed by influxes, generally of other Aryan speakers. Today, Indo-European in whatever form is familiar to most of the world while anthropologists and linguists lack certainty about the tongues of the Mediterraneans who invaded Europe during the Neolithic era, or the languages of the Bronze period, let alone what the primeval Europeans spoke, even though all of these groups bequeathed their appearances, in full or in part, to the various white (or mixed-white) peoples of today.
To illustrate the ebb and flow of languages, whether of Aryan or another origin, one may initially cite Italy and Spain. Despite progress made in understanding its alphabet, much remains to be learned of the language of the Etruscans, with their center in contemporary Tuscany; at one time, it was considered non-Aryan, and Etruscans have been described as near-eastern in facial appearance. If this people had retained their hold on the Italian peninsula, then our understanding of past events in "Italy" would have come through writers of Etruscan script, and our trade, diplomatic, and cultural ties to the "boot" would require at some point an understanding of Etruscan. There is some speculation more recently that Etruscan was actually an early Indo-European language brought over from the eastern Mediterranean, but, in any case it ceased to be spoken by the end of the first century A.D.
In Italy, as well, Keltic was a language, associated with a particular type of Nordic that fought--as Gauls--for supremacy over the speakers of proto-Latin. In the end, Italic (as formal Latin) won the contest, with tremendous repercussions for the world. Coon points out that these two language groups were initially related (though to most moderns a link between Keltic and Romance languages is difficult to appreciate); and further that the Roman leadership class shared a Keltic-Nordic physical type with the Kelts, who bestowed their offspring and languages far and wide, and once had a center of dominance in southwestern Germany.
In Spain, Semitic Carthaginian--related to Phoenician--was spoken in some portions of Andalusia (for example, consider the name sake Cartagena); but was extinguished in Iberia by the Roman victories in the Punic Wars--though not in the area of Carthage itself. Meanwhile, further north, there is a living remnant of a far older past in the form of the Basque language, unintelligible to most Spaniards. Linguists continue to dispute the origins of a language that they can compare only very tentatively with others spoken far from Iberia. Coon linked the Basques with the Age of Bronze, based on their physical type which, he concluded, was a mixture of the Dinaric race arriving in Europe at that time with already resident Atlanto-Mediterraneans. One could assume (even if Coon does not), that in addition to Semitic Carthaginian and the mysterious Basque, some form of Hamitic was also spoken in Europe proper, brought over by the diminutive Mediterraneans from North Africa who chose not to migrate towards the Nile Delta during a period of climate change when the desert began to erode fertile farm lands. But, on this point, Coon was not as forthright as Madison Grant, as Grant stated confidently that the language of the early Mediterraneans in Europe was Hamitic.
The British Isles as a "Case in Point"
To do justice to the vast coverage of ROE, it is helpful to see how his methodology based on the available skeletal record, archaeological discoveries, historical findings and recollections, and an examination of data on the "living" (to include individuals studied with cranial measuring tools) is applied to the British Isles. For Americans have had a variant of English as the binding national language for four centuries, and the British Empire once encircled the globe. Today, English, reflecting the accumulated power and prestige of the Anglo-Americans, has vast influence as an international idiom, surpassing the once potent French as the language of diplomacy, culture, and technology.
Coon found that most of the British Isles, in which he includes Ireland, Britain proper, Wales, Cornwall, and Scotland, to be more complicated in their record of human habitation than one would expect, given their marginal position on the periphery of Europe. The record of humanity in the Isles, specifically Britain proper, Coon traced back to the earliest known sapiens, identified by the location of skeletal findings as "Galley Hill" man, "Swanscombe" man, and, more problematically he acknowledged, "Piltdown" man (determined subsequently to be a fraud). Whatever the defects of claims regarding these remains--whether as to sapiens status or actual age--Coon judged that primal humanity in the form of a primitive Mediterranean appeared in the dimmest past and mixed with Neanderthal populations to give rise to Upper Paleolithic types (as on the continent). There followed the Neolithic era of farming, with small and tall Mediterraneans arriving, with Coon giving more importance to the latter (the megalith-building Atlanto-Mediterraneans, who created such monuments as Stonehenge) since the actual skeletal record for the smaller variety was scanty. The Ages of Bronze (copper first, to be alloyed with tin), was conveyed by a combined group from central Europe arriving via the Rhine (with Dinarics in the mixture), and unaccompanied invading Dinarics of an earlier inception coming in directly from the Near East. On the isle of Britain proper, the Bronze Age elements pushed back the largely Megalithic Mediterraneans to the hills.
Of greater significance, whether from the physical or linguistic standpoint for the British Isles, is the arrival of the Kelts in approximately 500 B.C. The designation "Britain" began to be used in classical antiquity about 200 years later to refer to the island of Britain in imitation of the terminology the new invaders used. The Kelts, who were representatives of Iron Age culture, Coon described as moderately long-headed Nordics, with sloping foreheads, and probably having brown rather than blond hair. They created, for a time, an almost binding physical type and culture in Britain proper, extending to central Scotland, but advancing no farther against the resistance of the Picts. Coon regarded the Picts as lighter than commonly thought and probably a remnant of the comprehensive/part Dinaric group that had arrived from central Europe; they may have spoken an early form of Keltic even though, seemingly in contrast to his own system, they were part of the earlier Bronze invasions. In Ireland, the Kelts were somewhat less concentrated, except in the upper class, which imposed their clan system (headed by "the Kings of Tara") and language on their predecessors in the Emerald Isle.
The Roman invasions led by Caesar and ultimate occupation of Britain ("Britannia") under Emperor Claudius were not decisively important for the racial development of the British Isles. Ireland was bypassed entirely, and the Empire ultimately stayed south of Scotland. Further, the Roman administrators themselves may have differed only slightly from the conquered Kelts, whose language endured with some admixture of Roman speech. What might have changed Britain proved transitory: the Romans brought in racial Alpines of the type found in much of the Italian peninsula and elsewhere to populate the towns and to form a merchant class. Coon reported that evaluation of skeletal remains in Kent, the area of greatest Roman strength in Britain, suggested that this Roman-Alpine population endured as a substantial group into the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance, but after that time has appeared only sporadically among particular individuals.
The Roman connection with their island outpost was severed by new incursions of Germanic tribes throughout the Empire early in the fifth century. Romans citizens and subjects were left to stay or leave as they saw fit. The new Teutonic invaders broke the lingering Keltic hold over Britain and gradually marginalized an emerging Kelto-Roman language. These incoming Angles-Saxons-Jutes, of a more robust and blonder Nordic type than the Kelts, reduced the cultural centers of the latter to surviving pockets in Strathclyde (western Scotland), Wales, and Cornwall. In Wales, a form of the language has survived into the present; it died out in Cornwall in the 19th century. Western Scotland received an influx of Keltic-speakers from Ireland in 500 AD, who in apparently unintentional cooperation with Saxon invaders on the east coast, put an end to Pictish domination in the Scottish North.
After the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, it is possible to speak of "Angle-land" (at least south of Scotland), with the name "Britain" a reminder of the older heritage. Ireland, however, remained a Keltic refuge from the Anglo-Saxon occupation. But the Kelts of Ireland could not repel the further incursions of Northmen from Denmark and Norway, who occupied the Irish east coast, to include Dublin. They also became a presence in eastern England and Scotland.
Slightly later came the somewhat anomalous Normans, of the same Scandinavian "Norse" mold. The Normans, having taken up residence in the French peninsula that bears their name, absorbed a form of Roman-derived French and subsequently began an invasion of England. After their victory at the Battle of Hastings (1066), they began to fuse their language with the English of the Anglo-Saxons, not replacing it, but gradually giving it the far greater Latin/French-based vocabulary that it has today. The name "England" would continue. A century later, the Normans began a fateful encroachment into Irish territory; this centuries long, tedious process would ultimately bring Ireland under the dominion of England and, in its north, of lowlands Scots. From a racial standpoint, the Normans, as an elite overlord class were no longer numerous enough amidst the growing population to profoundly change the composition of the British Isles, but the English language would push the Keltic Gaelic of Ireland to its remote corners in the south and west; parallel to what had happened when the earlier Anglo-Saxons subdued the Kelts as the Roman Empire in the west disintegrated.
In his study of the contemporary populations throughout the British Isles of the earlier 20th century, Coon began first with Ireland, as easier to trace and amply documented--in contrast to the somewhat more difficult situation in the English isle, where extensive documentation was less available, especially for the contemporary population. Of particular importance in ROE is a collection of anthropometric data on 10,000 male individuals compiled in Northern Ireland and the south (officially referred to as the Irish Free State at the time) and assembled by Coon's colleagues at Harvard to create a "composite" Irishman. Based in great measure on evaluation of this data, Coon found that a critical development separating the Irish from their regional neighbors was "the reemergence of the Paleolithic element" of the Pleistocene and Mesolithic eras. These, whether long headed or round headed, were in the process of making a comeback in the Emerald Isle and had a much greater influence on the overall population than might be presumed. He concluded that it was "no exaggeration" that the pre-Neolithic aboriginals contributed about half of the genetic ancestry of the contemporary Irish.
Via the photographic supplement, readers were invited to note comparisons with the current populations of western North Africa to see how the Paleolithic heritage was a common thread tying together the Irish and certain North Africans despite the differences of language and culture that separate histories had dictated. This heritage fostered an overall larger head-size and muscular frame in Ireland, and the reddish hair--which was probably not as characteristic of the Keltic Nordics, who were largely brown or light-brown haired. The widely-noticed Irish tendency to freckling undoubtedly sprang from aboriginal sources. This element reappeared in an almost undiluted form, particularly in the southwest. Overall, Coon found that in greater part the modern Irish were a blend of these "Upper Paleolithic" people with "Keltic Iron Age Nordics"; secondary components were Atlanto-Mediterraneans, and Dinarics who had arrived during the Bronze Age. Smaller Mediterraneans were not an abundant presence.
Despite the fact that on the "main island," Anglo-Saxon speech had created a land and people known respectively as "England" and "the English," overall findings to date demonstrated, as reliably as possible (there being no survey of the "living" comparable to the massive study Coon had for Ireland), that England was from the racial standpoint a more reliable Keltic than an Anglo-Saxon homeland. A Keltic type of brown-haired Nordic with a receding forehead was basic throughout England and Scotland as well--both in the past and present.
Further, there was no white aboriginal resurgence as in Eire. What had occurred, particularly with industrialization, was a reemergence of a shorter-statured brunet population that Coon had thought originally less important than the Atlanto-Mediterranean element in England, Scotland, and Wales. As if echoing Grant, based perhaps on common sources, Coon attributed this increase of shorter, dark people to the industrial revolution and the growth of slums, which somehow selected more favorably for a once submerged and less notable group: ROE detected its rise in the industrial cities of both England (midlands region) and Scotland (notably Glasgow). The small Mediterraneans had probably reemerged in Wales (already a statistically darker land by English standards), as well.
There are many ironies in the study of population transformations and linguistic dominance. The Kelts, who had once given most of the British Isles a binding language, despite the different variations of Keltic, were now less associated with the pockets of this language that remained in Wales and western Scotland. In these regions, as once in Cornwall, this remnant speech was frequently uttered on the lips of people who were Mediterraneans, and hence pre-Keltic. In the special case of Cornwall, whence Coon's paternal ancestors originated, ROE reported that there were some dark, curly-haired Middle Eastern Dinarics, especially sailors, whose forebears came from Troy--if local legends had grains of truth.
With respect to other more ancient or exotic survivals in England, Coon cited the work of H. J. Fleure (The Races of England and Wales) to show that in some remote Welsh areas, there remained a more primitive Mediterranean of the type antedating the Neolithic arrival, which possibly recalled the very early sapiens (unmixed with Neanderthal strains). Overall, though, to prevent too much from being made of Welsh Mediterraneans, Coon found that the original bearers of Keltic speech in the principality, the Keltic Nordics, were still the majority type, if less so than in the rest of England proper. Further, certain areas of Wales were important centers of red-hair. Whether it was only the Mediterranean stratum, as opposed to the others, that kept Keltic speech alive there is not abundantly clear in ROE.
Meanwhile, the actual Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian English made a strong presence in eastern England and Scotland, being more blond (sometimes ash blond) than a typical, browner-haired Englishman. Reiterating some ideas that remain popular, Coon reported that the English, to include in great measure the Scots, had slightly darker eyes than the Irish, but tended towards lighter hair. Like the Irish, they were generally fair-skinned; further their skin usually burned rather than tanned when exposed to the sun. Despite the lack of an "Upper Paleolithic" resurgence comparable to developments in Eire, red hair and freckling were notable in some areas. The Scots rivaled the Irish in the presence of freckling and red hair shades. Not necessarily invoking Upper Paleolithic inspiration, Coon linked them to some mutation in those Dinarics who had participated in the invasion of Scotland via the Rhine during the Bronze Age.
With respect to other attributes of the Scots (who are not separated out from the English as neatly as the Welsh in ROE), Coon reported that they were the tallest people in England. Concerning local elements in Scotland, the Keltic-speaking survivors in the western highlands paralleled the Irish in having dark hair and blue eyes; not astonishing in view of the onslaught of Gaelic-speaking Kelts from Ireland that had trapped the Picts in a pincer movement as Saxons invaded from the East.
The Other Living "Races of Europe"
Not always with the same detail that he employed in treating the British Isles, given the vastness of the project and varying amounts of data, Coon covered the peoples of the North--the Finns, Lapps, Samoyeds, Swedes, modern Norwegians, and Danes; the "Central Zone" of French, Belgians, Germanic peoples, the Hungarians and Slavs, the greater Mediterranean world--from Iberia, across North Africa to the Middle East and Arabia, Anatolia, and the Caucasus; and the contemporary peripheries of the white race in Central Asia and West Siberia. He found great stretches of the Alpine race from France to Syria, and then on to Central Asia. Among some findings: the Alpine race was much stronger in France than in Switzerland, where the Alpine mountain nation was once considered the homeland of this race; the Nordic race appeared only sporadically as a pure type in Germany, being mixed with Borreby's, Alpines, and East Baltics; along the Black Sea periphery from the Caucasus, through southern Ukraine, and into Balkans, and even Central Europe (Czechoslovakia and Bavaria) Coon reported a notable diffusion of a type similar to the Atlanto-Mediterranean, which he preferred to designate as "Pontic"; the modern Hungarian was more apt to be of mixed central and eastern European origin--only a smaller element with a somewhat more Mongoloid appearance could typify the true "Magyar" element in the population (exemplar of the latter disclosed in the photo section, o/i, p. 417).
One of the great merits (despite the risks) of ROE is its extensive photographic supplement of mostly living participants intended to illustrate virtually all of the racial types classified in the book. Perhaps of the peripheral races, only the Ainu of northern Japan are not covered. Coon stresses that to appreciate the underlying unity of particular exemplars, the reader must thrust aside the visible differences imposed by dress, coiffure, and cultural and social status. Putting aside such distinctions is, however, complicated by an additional need to ignore differences in facial mold based on varying degrees of linguistic tension (language variations, Coon admitted, guide the use of facial muscles), and possibly subtle differences in the deposit of flesh over the skull. Thus ROE asks the reader to note some parallels between certain Paleolithic survivors in North Africa and their counterparts in Eire, but the comparison doesn't always come off easily; similarly, the Alpines from Germany, particularly, and those from various points in the Near East have a different look, presumably based on millennia of separation in different language zones, and dissimilar climates.
On a day-to-day- basis, it can hardly be doubted that most readers would have difficulty in distinguishing many dark Alpines from Mediterraneans, or light ones from Nordics. It may be hard, too, on the basis of a glance to separate some Borreby types from Nordics or Mediterraneans, especially in areas away from the Borreby homeland of Denmark and northern Germany. Basically, most people cannot see that anthropologically; they go by the gestalt of coloration combined with facial features that are immediately visible, not by the shape of the skull as viewed from above or measured with various calipers.
The American Past and Future
Ignoring the claims of the "Norse apologists" who set an 11th century date for the discovery and initial settlement of North America under Lief Ericsson and Erik the Red, Coon pinpointed 1492 as turning point in which the peripheral nations of Europe turned outward to conquer the New World and the extreme Southern Hemisphere. These nations, particularly England, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands, were strongholds of the Mediterranean race in its two basic forms, the Nordic and the initially brunet-shaded type. The Nordics were the conquerors of North America, subduing aboriginal peoples (with possibly distant connections to the Ice Age hunter gatherers of prehistoric Europe), while their darker counterparts, especially the Spanish, conquered relatively crowded New World Amerindian empires already in place, or least their remnants. America--the United States--had emerged as a great Nordic reservoir, whose earliest colonists were not necessarily typical of the English, but were selected for their mission, and had interbred in a new and challenging environment creating new generations of "gangling" creatures. Coon took no stand on the recently imposed immigration restrictions, but by implication, could be cited against them (and against Madison Grant), as he had maintained at the outset, that Polish emigrants to the United States were more Nordic than their compatriots who stayed behind. In that sense, the immigration quotas, were not necessarily "pro-" but anti-Nordic.
The achievements of majority-Alpine France in the New World, however, are a notable omission. Despite their defeat in the French and Indian Wars, France had left an enduring presence in Quebec (as well as in Louisiana) and rendered indispensable support in the creation of the independent American nation. Had Napoleon not had his reasons for selling off the vast tract that was the Louisiana Purchase, the Alpine nation, indeed, would have been a factor to contend with on the western border of the young Nordic republic.
A Critique
The historical context in which Coon wrote was dramatic: it was the eve of a new war, with Hitler ascendant, but about to run out of bloodless victories; Mussolini was firmly established in Italy and was issuing racial edits of his own; and Franco was about to assume control of Spain in Madrid. Stalin was the helmsman in the Kremlin. To have access to published studies, archaeological sites, and museums, or simply to be able to discuss findings with eminent anthropologists throughout Europe, it was necessary for the scholar to be somewhat the diplomat. It was clear that Coon rejected the findings of popular Nazi-oriented writers on racial topics, opposed the cult of Nordicism; and followed the work of the German-Jewish anthropologist, Franz Weidenreich, very closely.
But caution was the best option. The journal Deutsche Rassenkunde is praised for the contributions of its editors and writers, who must have functioned under National Socialist supervision. Similarly, Coon refers to the Germany's political unity as an achievement of Bismarck and its social unity as an accomplishment of Hitler (o/i, p. 535). There is no no other mention of Hitler and no attempt to determine his racial status; Mussolini is without a single reference; but, whether as a "dig" or not, Franco is described a Mediterranean like most of his Spanish colleagues, but as a "hook-nosed Cappadocian" variant (i.e., with origins in Anatolia). In concluding ROE, Coon expressed admiration of his Soviet counterparts for their skill in making careful anthropological measurements and their expertise in classifying Mongoloid types and Ural-Altaic speakers: "...we must take off our hats to our colleagues in Moscow (o/i, p. 649)."
There is no doubt that his horizon was rooted in the supremacy of the first-world empires that was on its way to virtual reversal in the decades after World War II. Coon, in remarking on the relative technological ignorance of Europeans about to encounter Bronze Age technologies brought in from by new invaders from the east, stated that a post-Neolithic "Italian or Spaniard could no more produce a metal dagger than a modern Arab can make a machine-gun." Nothing could sound more passe today.
Coon was an example of "humbition" (an apt coinage of the late philosopher Walter Kaufmann). Ambitious enough to offer a comprehensive theory spanning literally hundreds of millennia and to apply it to living populations nearly worldwide. But he did so without any cocksure arrogance and with sufficient humility to welcome further research in areas that needed clarification, and where he could not be certain. The Mesolithic period remained murky. The Alpines did dwell on a vast expanse from France to the Caucasus and Central Asia, so that some vast migrations could have occurred; or the post-glacial peoples who emerged as shrunken "Alpines" in Europe could have dwelt throughout a vast range in distant millennia to produce "foetalized" Alpine counterparts in Asia. What was the pre-agricultural history of the food-producing Mediterraneans, who were to migrate west and spread their technology to Europe? The origins of the Corded proto-Nordics and the megalithic-building Atlanto-Mediterraneans were, he conceded, other weak points in the overall fabric of ROE. He also regretted that he had more information on smaller exotic populations on the northern and central Asian fringes of Europe than on many major countries of basically white populations.
Today, one could take issue with some of his comments on contemporary populations based on his own travels and studies of the published record. With respect to coloration of particular races and racial mixtures in Greater Europe, use of Internet-based sites such as You Tube, enables arm-chair anthropologists to study in living color the composition of musical groups (and their audiences), soldiers on parade, soccer teams playing, politicians debating, etc.; on this basis, one might conclude (as this writer) that Slovenes, as well as Croatians, have more dark-haired types than he might have recognized, while Serbs have many individuals with lighter hair. Coon's record of the living can serve as a guide for those who want to take their own video tour of the areas explored in ROE to verify or contradict if necessary.
A fundamental shortcoming sprang from the very title he had chosen in honor of Ripley, the anthropologist with whom at many points he disagreed. Obviously, ROE is not dealing with the racial elements of "Europe," but with a vast Eurasian, North African, West Asian, and East African expanse. For example, ROE depicts the literal center of the Mediterranean race not in Italy or Spain, but in the Arabian peninsula. Coon himself must have realized that The Races of Europe was too constricting; perhaps The Races of Trans-Europe would have served him better. Certainly, no reader of the book could conclude that the origins of the whites are cast in a strictly European context.
Further, though an expert in construction and organization of scholarly writings, with a tremendous command of vocabulary, Coon did not author a book that is easily understood by an interested general reader; ROE is heavily filled with anthropological shop-jargon. This text must have been difficult for those, who as college students of the era, had to be tested on its contents. It can be appreciated only after several reads. In other instances, Coon did write for a wider public.
Overall, one could also ask: Why Race? He did not claim to have a clear definition of a concept the he considered fluid. In finding distinct types of whites, he stressed he wanted no part in casting any aspersions. The color of the Europeans, however contrasting, was of lesser and fleeting importance; with whites it was subject to change over the centuries. Skeletal and facial form and metrics were more decisive. What was clear was that particular branches of the common race provided progressive technologies to less advanced populations, whether systematic crop-growing or animal breeding, the use of copper and iron, or even the development of sea-going craft that could conquer the first "space barrier." Eras of conquest had given Europe its lasting set of mutually intelligible languages that were a bridge connecting past, present, and future. For the author of ROE, it might have been a culmination of an interest in the actual variety of humans he could see in his childhood travels to Egypt with his father, a cotton broker. Race was fascinating because it's here and there.
On some points Coon proved prophetic--though not alone. A Neanderthal presence in modern European populations is now conceded; at least in part, full humans had interbred with this Ice Age relic. And he was reasonably accurate in other areas. One finding that primitive sea-going craft of ancient peoples could navigate the Mediterranean and reach points as far as Scotland was basically corroborated after the war by Thor Heyerdahl, who used primitive vessels to confirm the ability of early seafarers to travel long distances in the Pacific. That there was a Mediterranean element that arrived in the British Isles (and at other Western European locations) from elsewhere, bringing megalith-building technologies and agriculture is conceded in a recent broadcast of findings on Public Radio International (PRI). Readers of ROE would not be startled at all that there was a "Maria" who dwelt in Eire, and who had bequeathed remains with DNA that is found in present-day Sardinia. She is described as small rather than an Atlanto-Mediterranean (which Coon thought more important in the British Isles). The article, accompanied by a brief interview segment can be accessed via the following link:
https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-12-30/dna-solves-mysteries-ancient-ireland
Nor is it startling to find here that, based on discoveries of remains dated a thousand years later (the "Rathlin boys"), that the modern Irish have DNA traced to the steppes of Russia, rather than the Mediterranean area; that would be in accordance with the view, not limited to Coon at the time, that the center of the Indo-European speakers was in the west of Russia--and that an original Keltic, with other Aryan languages, probably had its origins in this region. One point of difference is that this report of findings indicates that the Keltic presence in the Emerald Isle (and presumably elsewhere in the British Isles) considerably antedates the 500 B.C. approximation of Coon and others and is part of the Bronze Age.
Again, to cite the British Isles as a case in point, the application of DNA-based genetics has led to some conclusions about the extent of hunter-gatherer heritage in the people of modern England, that even inflate Coon's estimates. While ROE had found a paleolithic survivor resurgence in Ireland, with a Mediterranean upswing in the demographics of the modern Kingdom of England, a recent study contends that most English have hunter-gatherer genetics, with much less impact from those who came later, to include the Kelts (David Miles,The Tribes of England). (Consult the link below at--
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/07/0719_050719_britishgene.html )
This type of recent work has its limitations: the author, as others who employ DNA analysis, concede that the approach is in its infancy, and further pruning is necessary. One important aspect worth consideration is the decisiveness of trace elements rather than a majority DNA component in guiding actual physical appearance. The contrast is frequently posed as genotype vs. phenotype. That there are definite Mediterraneans, Dinarics, and Nordics present in the British Isles, in addition to those who would bear an appearance that recalls the earlier Brunn's-Borreby's, is beyond dispute. Perhaps an individual could be of approximately 80 percent genetic post-Glacial inheritance, but look about 90 percent Keltic-Nordic or Atlanto-Mediterranean, based on the role of the remaining 20 (or fewer) percentage points in driving the overall physical appearance. Classical physical anthropology and the new genetics of DNA might reach an accommodation on the basis of the role of trace elements in guiding--at least--outward appearance.
Recessional
The Races of Europe marked Coon's upward trajectory leading to a generation of prominence, with posts at the University of Pennsylvania and recognition beyond the academic community to the new medium of television. A downward path was imminent with the publication of Coon's The Origin of Races (1962). The Second Reconstruction Era of the rising Negro Civil Rights movement and sustained efforts to overturn legalized segregation in the American South, was in its heyday--nearly 100 years after the abolition of slavery that was ultimately followed by the collapse of the First Reconstruction in the South. In briefest essence, citing the evidence of fossil remains, Coon had argued in Origin that the five major branches of humanity--Congoids, Capoids, Australoids, Caucasoids, and Mongoloids--had developed their characteristic racial appearances before becoming fully sapiens; further, their entrance into a completely human homo sapiens state was timed separately, with the date for the entrance into humanity of the white Caucasoids and black Congoids at opposites extremes: that of the former timed at more than 200,000 years ago; of the latter, roughly 30,000 years ago. Originally, in ROE Coon was confident in the viability of his thesis that the Caucasoids derived from a Neanderthal-sapiens blend. Now the author was most likely a changed man, as was his Neanderthal--tentatively placed in the Caucasoid tree.
Coon avowed no political aims, but he was seen by publicists for segregation as in their corner, for he had stated at the outset his supposition that the longer a race had been sapiens, the greater its capacity for civilization. Carleton Putnam, one of the most prominent of the anti-integration publicists of the period (v. discussion in review of Conquest of a Continent), sought and got Coon's assistance behind the scenes in framing the arguments to be used in stating his case; particularly Coon counseled against any explicit references to the Nordicist Grant.
On a number of occasions, Putnam was a visitor at Coon's home. They were actually distant relatives, both being descended from Revolutionary War General Israel Putnam. (This covert collaboration is related in John P. Jackson's paper, "In Ways UnAcademical: The Reception of Carleton S. Coon's The Origin of Races.") Throughout their association, Coon declined to become a formal contributor to organizations combating the concept of racial egalitarianism, such as the early International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics (IAAEE), or to openly join in the struggle. He was having sufficient problems of his own, with some highly critical reviews and commentary pertaining to The Origin of Races. When the American Society of Physical Anthropologists voted to condemn Putnam's Race and Reason, Coon resigned as president upon learning that only one member had actually read the book.
Coon would continue to write on anthropological topics. A major work was The Living Races of Man written in 1965, in collaboration with anthropologist Edward E. Hunt, co-author with Coon of Anthropology from A to Z (1963). He would also later publish his memoirs as an OSS agent in North Africa shortly before his passing.
But by the early 1970's his veiled bitterness could be discerned on a dust jacket. Not many noticed. In an episode not reported in the Jackson paper, and little known today--a tome much more in the tradition of Grant authored originally in 1972 by one Wilmot Robertson (a pseudonym for the still mysterious Humphrey Ireland) had the following comments from a "foremost anthropologist," later explicitly identified as Carleton S. Coon: "A vast work of scope and scholarship....It carries a heavy blow to the solar plexus....The style is simple, lucid and in places, inspiring." This book, The Dispossessed Majority, countered the growing interest on the political right in corralling Jewish support for conservatism with a strong plea for ostracism of Jews and downgrading their influence; Robertson-Ireland repeated the concept that there was a majority type consisting of Nordics and moderately pigmented Alpines (differing slightly in this sense from Grant) that personified the American nation; forcefully reiterated various arguments for black-white differences, and throughout, pictured a United States in a state of degeneration and accelerating cultural decline. The abyss could be averted by a great in-gathering of Nordics and other northern-Europeans.
That it was Coon who was selected as the lead endorser could only be presumed at the time; but that would be in keeping with his "secret agent" posture of working behind the scenes. Determining whether it was Coon's anger and frustration with the "shape of things that were coming" that spoke, rather than his actual comprehension or appreciation of the contents of Dispossessed Majority, is a project requiring deeper research into his papers.
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